Data for Children Collaborative Poverty Team Expands Geospatial Innovation with Scalable Travel Time Maps for the Entire Continent of Africa
Our collaborative team, led by Dr. Gary Watmough from the School of Geosciences at the University of Edinburgh, developed a scalable solution for generating travel maps that uses only free open data, allowing it to be applied to any country in the World.
This work is part of an extension of one of our very successful original projects with UNICEF, mapping children's physical accessibility to key services (health facilities, clinics, schools, etc.). The main aim of the original work was to establish if the travel time to these services could explain the lack of access to that service and its potential relationship to multidimensional childhood poverty.
Building on the groundbreaking results, the team continued to leverage advanced Geographic Information Systems (GIS) techniques and innovative methods that account for travel time to map a staggering 54 countries across the African continent with the precision of a 100-meter resolution.
The maps are now readily available for public access on the Humanitarian Data Exchange (HDX), providing a critical resource for governments, NGOs, and international agencies.
"This innovation not only deepens our understanding of childhood poverty but also ensures the solution is scalable and sustainable," said Dr. Gary Watmough, Principal Investigator. "The bespoke software allows for flexible granularity and can be run locally, making it accessible to users worldwide."
This work has already had a positive impact on UNICEF. UNICEF Iraq has used the findings from this project to estimate child deprivation from Earth Observation data in a policy document currently being drafted. The ongoing consultancy work for UNICEF that stemmed from this project is exploring the changes and geographic distribution of child poverty and well-being in Iraq.
Dr Watmough, the Principal investigator on this project, was invited to the UN General Assembly in New York in September 2024 to present on this work.
Download the Original 20m Travel Maps (original resolution for 4 countries)
Download 100m Resolution Travel Maps for 54 Countries in Africa
Read a Manuscript Describing the Data and Methods
Watch Dr Watmough Explaining the 100m Resolution Methodology