The Place Alert Portal: A Reusable Digital Infrastructure and platform for Climate, Environment and Maternal Health Research in Sub-Saharan Africa

The Place Alert Portal [portal.placealert.org] is a web-based research infrastructure that turns environmental health code, data pipelines and analytical models into reusable tools, dashboards, catalogues and training resources. Its value is in moving work beyond individual scripts into accessible systems that can be rerun through a browser, reducing dependence on specialist local software, cloud expertise and manual data handling. This is especially important for sub-Saharan Africa, where ground sensor networks are sparse, environmental data are fragmented, and demand for climate-health analysis and training is growing.
The platform is based on growing outputs from the NIH funded CHEAQI-MNCH (PIs-
Makanga and Govindasamy) and the HE2AT (PIs Luchters and Chersich). The platform
currently hosts six analytical applications, two JupyterHub environments, API-based data governance, two AI-enabled data catalogues and two self-paced short courses. It provides a practical route from research code to reusable infrastructure for exposure assessment, data interrogation, hypothesis generation, surveillance, early warning and training.