Best practices in availability, management and use of geospatial data to guide reproductive, maternal, child and adolescent health programmes.

### Summary box Improving reproductive, maternal, newborn, child and adolescent health (RMNCAH) has been at the centre of international and national development strategies for decades. Closing the inequality gap in mortality and coverage of RMNCAH services continues to be central to global development and is a key objective of the renewed global commitment to ‘leave no one behind’.1 To successfully target poor and other hard-to-reach groups, stakeholders need up-to-date, highly disaggregated subnational estimates of RMNCAH service coverage, quality of care and staffing, which are not readily available in low-income and middle-income countries. The application of geospatial analysis in RMNCAH provides a unique advantage to develop subnational estimates of mortality and service coverage. For example, including geocoded attributes in health facility and household survey datasets can identify subnational inequality hotspots (places of significant inequality) with high-resolution RMNCAH coverage maps. In a recent review of the application of geospatial methods to maternal and child health, Ebener et al 2 broadly categorised the field into three approaches in increasing order of complexity: