Google Alerts for Maternal Health

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Last month, I wrote about Tableau Public, a site where you can input/upload data and create a variety of charts, graphs, and maps. Another tool that I’ve been using is Google Alerts to get stories about maternal health sent to my inbox everyday. At the MHTF, we do a lot of mapping so I started to think about what countries were being mentioned in the Google Alerts.

My first attempt was in English and I quickly realized that was insufficient as major gaps appeared in Central and South America and francophone Africa. I added alerts in Spanish and French in order to get results for countries where English stories might be rare.

There were a total of 342 items where a single country (or two) was identified in an article covering 72 countries. Overall, the number of articles on maternal health was significantly higher, but many were about the issue in general or on a global scale. Argentina led the way with 37 stories, followed by the US, the Philippines, and Mexico.

For the most part, it looks like there is pretty good geographic coverage, except for the Middle East and North Africa and parts of Europe. However, this could be the result of the fact that English, Spanish and French were the only languages included. With languages in mind, don’t forget that the MHTF site will be available in French, Spanish, and Arabic soon!