GHOclient

Sponsored by Kwar-AI - AI-powered epidemiological intelligence

Introduction

The WHO Global Health Observatory is a large global health data repository that makes available an enormous collection of indicators which can be downloaded through their API. GHOclient is a Python client which helps data scientists search and access their data programmatically.

• Free software: MIT license
• Documentation: https://ghoclient.readthedocs.io.

Installation

Using pip:

pip install ghoclient

Using uv:

uv pip install ghoclient

For development:

git clone https://github.com/fccoelho/ghoclient.git
cd ghoclient
uv sync --extra dev

Features

• Search for indicators by keyword
• Browse available datasets
• List region and country codes
• Get the data as pandas DataFrames

Example usage

Basic usage with the GHO class:

from ghoclient import GHO

gho = GHO()

# Get all available indicators
indicators = gho.get_indicators()

# Search for specific indicators
malaria_indicators = gho.search_indicators('malaria')

# Get data for a specific indicator
life_expectancy = gho.get_data('WHOSIS_000001', countries=['BRA', 'USA'])

Legacy usage with index search:

import ghoclient
ghoclient.index.search('smoking')

The above lines will fetch a DataFrame with all indicators containing the word smoking in their description.

API Reference

GHO Class

Main interface for accessing WHO GHO data.

• get_indicators()

  Returns a DataFrame with all available indicators.

• search_indicators(query)

  Search for indicators containing the query string.

  • query: Search term
  • Returns: DataFrame with matching indicators

• get_data(code, countries=None, filter_query=None)

  Get data for a specific indicator.

  • code: Indicator code (e.g., 'WHOSIS_000001')
  • countries: Optional list of country codes to filter by
  • filter_query: Optional OData filter query string
  • Returns: DataFrame with the requested data

GHOSession Class

Low-level session class for direct API access.

Credits

This package was created with Cookiecutter and the audreyr/cookiecutter-pypackage project template.