Global Femtech Map

An interactive world map of femtech and women's health innovation — the startups, apps, clinics, NGOs, funds and communities building better care for women, everywhere.

It began as a response to women's-health maps that leave most of the world blank. This one aims for the opposite: 339 cited initiatives across 154 countries, with deep, deliberate coverage of Africa and the Global South that most maps overlook, and every continent represented.

Founders featured on the Blush & Bloom podcast carry a 🎙 badge linking their episode.

Built by Gigi Kenneth — founder of Asele and host of Blush & Bloom.

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What's on the map

• 339 initiatives · 154 countries · 6 continents
• Six categories: menstrual & cycle, maternal & fertility, sexual & reproductive health, diagnostics & devices, telehealth, and funding & community
• Real startups where they exist; where a country has no verifiable femtech company, its national UNFPA women's-health programme stands in, so no country with active work sits empty
• Every single pin cites a source URL

Features

• Explore by country — click any country to focus the map to it and list every initiative mapped there; the stat cards recalculate to that country
• Click a pin for a detail panel: description, category, location, link, source, and (for podcast guests) the episode
• Filter by category, search initiatives/countries, or isolate the 🎙 Blush & Bloom founders
• Zoom spreads out dense city clusters so individual dots stay legible
• Editorial landing hero, accessible colour/typography, responsive down to mobile (detail panel becomes a bottom sheet)

Tech stack

Plain Vanilla JS + Vite + d3-geo. No backend, no database — an art-directed SVG world map with data in editable JSON files.

npm install
npm run dev      # local dev server
npm run build    # production build → dist/ (also prerenders reports + SEO files)
npm run preview  # preview the production build

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Country reports

Beyond the map, the site publishes researched, cited country ecosystem reports at /reports/ — scrollytelling deep-dives on femtech and women's-health innovation per country (funding, policy, founders, hubs), each claim linking to a public source. No scoring or tiers; reports are qualitative.

• Data: one JSON per country in src/data/reports/<slug>.json, plus _index.json (the grid + coming-soon list).
• Render: src/report-render.js is a pure module (no browser/Vite deps) shared by the client hydrator (src/report.js, src/reports-index.js) and the Node prerender.
• Prerender: scripts/prerender.mjs runs inside npm run build. For every report it bakes full HTML + head meta (title, description, canonical, OG, Article JSON-LD) into static pages at pretty URLs /reports/<slug>/, plus a "related countries" strip. It also bakes the /reports/ index grid (with ItemList JSON-LD), fills the home page's crawlable report links, and writes sitemap.xml + llms.txt.
• Validate: node test-reports.mjs checks every report's schema and that all claims are sourced. Run before deploy.

To add a country, see the recipe in docs/NEXT-STEPS.md.

SEO / GEO

Everything crawlers and AI engines need is generated at build time, no server:

• sitemap.xml — all pages, pretty URLs.
• robots.txt — allows general crawlers plus named AI crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, OAI-SearchBot, Google-Extended) so the reports can be cited in AI answers.
• llms.txt — a markdown summary + report index for AI crawlers (GEO), auto-generated from _index.json.
• Structured data — Article per report, ItemList on the reports index.
• Internal linking — home links to every report; each report links to related countries.

Live at femtech.asele.tech (Vercel; canonical points here). Verified in Google Search Console with the sitemap submitted — setup + gotchas in docs/search-console.md.

Analytics & monitoring

• Vercel Web Analytics — aggregate pageviews, referrers, countries, top pages. Privacy-friendly, no cookie banner. Wired via @vercel/analytics inject() in every page entry; view it in the Vercel dashboard.
• Live visitor feed (owner-only) — a real-time /live?key=<key> page streaming arrivals, page views, and report-link clicks with coarse location, cookieless. Each page pings api/ping.js, which forwards Vercel's geo headers to a secret ntfy topic; api/live.js renders the key-gated feed and the ntfy app gives phone push. No database. Setup in docs/live-feed-setup.md.

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Contributing

This map is community-sourced and open to contributions. Spotted a missing initiative, a wrong location, a broken link, or an error in a country report? There are two ways in:

• Suggest an edit (no GitHub needed) — the "Suggest an edit or addition" button on the map, and "Suggest an edit" on every report, open an in-site form. Submissions land in a review Google Sheet; corrections are applied by hand (nothing publishes automatically). Maintainer setup: docs/contributions-setup.md. (The older approved-to-map-live initiative form still works too: docs/submissions-setup.md.)
• Open a pull request — edit the JSON directly (below). The map is only as inclusive as the people who build it.

Add or fix an initiative

All data lives in JSON files under src/data/. To add an initiative, add one object to the appropriate file (see Data model below). Fields:

{
  "name": "Organization name",
  "org_type": "company | app | clinic | ngo | fund | community",
  "country": "Country",
  "city": "City",
  "lat": 6.5244,
  "lng": 3.3792,
  "category": "menstrual | maternal | srh | diagnostics | telehealth | funding",
  "description": "One factual sentence, 140 characters or fewer.",
  "url": "https://official-website.example",
  "source": "https://where-you-verified-this.example",
  "confidence": "high | medium",
  "podcast": {
    "guest_name": "Founder name",
    "episode_title": "Episode title",
    "episode_number": 17,
    "episode_url": "https://…"
  }
}

• source is required — every pin must cite where it came from. No unsourced entries.
• Drop the podcast block for anything that isn't a Blush & Bloom guest.
• lat/lng are the decimal coordinates of the org's city (any maps service gives these).
• Categories map to pin colours; pick the closest fit.

Guidelines

• Real, verifiable organizations only. If you can't cite a source, don't add it.
• One object per initiative. Keep descriptions factual and short.
• Names are de-duplicated case- and punctuation-insensitively, so you won't create an accidental double.
• Run npm run build before opening the PR to confirm the JSON parses.

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Data model

Data is split into layers, all merged and de-duplicated by name at runtime in src/main.js:

File	What it holds
src/data/initiatives.json	Core/seed set of well-known global femtech companies
src/data/more.json	Regional deep-scrape results and gap fills
src/data/podcast.json	Blush & Bloom guest-founder organizations (🎙)
src/data/communities.json	Femtech ecosystem networks, associations and accelerators
src/data/programs.json	National UNFPA / UN women's-health programmes that fill otherwise-empty countries
src/data/continents.js	Country → continent lookup (drives the click-to-explore behaviour)
src/data/meta.js	Small UI copy/config

Add a real startup to more.json; add a podcast guest to podcast.json; the rest are mostly maintained by the project.

A note on the data

The dataset was compiled from public sources and is cited but not exhaustive or infallible. Some entries are medium confidence, and a few placeholders (national UNFPA programmes) stand in for countries where no femtech company could be verified. Corrections and additions are always welcome — that's the point.

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Categories

Menstrual & cycle · Maternal & fertility · Sexual & reproductive health · Diagnostics & devices · Telehealth · Funding & community

Docs

Operational setup and handoff notes live in docs/:

Doc	Covers
NEXT-STEPS.md	Full handoff: current state, how the reports system works, the add-a-country recipe, open next steps, gotchas
contributions-setup.md	The "Suggest an edit" modal → Google Sheet pipeline (Apps Script, deploy, VITE_CONTRIBUTE_URL)
submissions-setup.md	The older approved-to-map-live initiative form (Google Form → Sheet → map JSON)
search-console.md	Google Search Console verification + sitemap, the verification gotchas, and why Bing is skipped
live-feed-setup.md	The owner-only /live real-time visitor feed (ntfy topic + env vars)

License

Code is available for reuse. The dataset is community-contributed and provided as-is for reference; please keep source attributions intact if you build on it.