Urban extent of Africa 2010

Accurate delineation of the urban and rural areas has a broad range of implications on the quality and reliability of agricultural production and socio-economic statistics, design of household survey, establishment of agricultural development strategies and policies, and effective resource allocation.

The two most widely-used urban/rural mapping dataset across Africa, GRUMP (Global Rural and Urban Mapping Project) and SAGE Urban Extents, use the underlying datasets of 2000-2002. There are various pilot studies attempting to update the dataset in major metropolitan areas or specific countries, but no African continent-wide effort has been made to date.

To address this, using the GRUMP 2000 data as the baseline, we used a set of recently-published datasets to identify the newly extended urban areas across Africa. Three main data sources were the nightlights data from Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) 2010-2013, WorldPop 2010, and the MODIS Global Land Cover 2010-2013. Country-level urban population headcounts and their share of total population were acquired from the World Bank for 2010-2013 and used to control the total size of the urban population from the analysis is consistent with the statistics data at 1 km resolution.