Related papers: High-Resolution Poverty Maps in Sub-Saharan Africa

Poverty maps are used to aid important political decisions such as allocation of development funds by governments and international organizations. Those decisions should be based on the most accurate poverty figures. However, often reliable…

Major decisions from governments and other large organizations rely on measurements of the populace's well-being, but making such measurements at a broad scale is expensive and thus infrequent in much of the developing world. We propose an…

Improving global school connectivity is critical for ensuring inclusive and equitable quality education. To reliably estimate the cost of connecting schools, governments and connectivity providers require complete and accurate school…

High-resolution human settlement maps provide detailed delineations of where people live and are vital for scientific and practical purposes, such as rapid disaster response, allocation of humanitarian resources, and international…

Accurate, fine-grained poverty maps remain scarce across much of the Global South. While Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) provide high-quality socioeconomic data, their spatial coverage is limited and reported coordinates are randomly…

This work presents an approach for combining household demographic and living standards survey questions with features derived from satellite imagery to predict the poverty rate of a region. Our approach utilizes visual features obtained…

Reliable data about the stock of physical capital and infrastructure in developing countries is typically very scarce. This is particular a problem for data at the subnational level where existing data is often outdated, not consistently…

Crop maps are crucial for agricultural monitoring and food management and can additionally support domain-specific applications, such as setting cold supply chain infrastructure in developing countries. Machine learning (ML) models,…

The rigorous evaluation of anti-poverty programs is key to the fight against global poverty. Traditional evaluation approaches rely heavily on repeated in-person field surveys to measure changes in economic well-being and thus program…

The lack of reliable data in developing countries is a major obstacle to sustainable development, food security, and disaster relief. Poverty data, for example, is typically scarce, sparse in coverage, and labor-intensive to obtain. Remote…

Spatial information on cropland distribution, often called cropland or crop maps, are critical inputs for a wide range of agriculture and food security analyses and decisions. However, high-resolution cropland maps are not readily available…

Satellite imagery has emerged as an important tool to analyse demographic, health, and development indicators. While various deep learning models have been built for these tasks, each is specific to a particular problem, with few standard…

Map construction methods automatically produce and/or update road network datasets using vehicle tracking data. Enabled by the ubiquitous generation of georeferenced tracking data, there has been a recent surge in map construction…

In 2023, 58.0% of the African population experienced moderate to severe food insecurity, with 21.6% facing severe food insecurity. Land-use and land-cover maps provide crucial insights for addressing food insecurity by improving…

Poverty is a multifaceted phenomenon linked to the lack of capabilities of households to earn a sustainable livelihood, increasingly being assessed using multidimensional indicators. Its spatial pattern depends on social, economic,…

Accurate crop type maps are an essential source of information for monitoring yield progress at scale, projecting global crop production, and planning effective policies. To date, however, crop type maps remain challenging to create in low…

We propose a generalizable framework for the population estimation of dense, informal settlements in low-income urban areas--so called 'slums'--using high-resolution satellite imagery. Precise population estimates are a crucial factor for…

Since the United Nations launched the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) in 2015, numerous universities, NGOs and other organizations have attempted to develop tools for monitoring worldwide progress in achieving them. Led by advancements…

Poverty status identification is the first obstacle to eradicating poverty. Village-level poverty identification is very challenging due to the arduous field investigation and insufficient information. The development of the Web…

Obtaining reliable data describing local poverty metrics at a granularity that is informative to policy-makers requires expensive and logistically difficult surveys, particularly in the developing world. Not surprisingly, the poverty…