A million children vaccinated
Childhood vaccinations against killer diseases like diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, measles and polio are among the most cost-effective ways to improve health, save lives, and ensure long-term prosperity for a country. Ensuring that every child receive these requires reliable and recent data on population sizes to measure need and plan delivery. Afghanistan has not had a population census since 1979 and has been reliant on highly uncertain projections ever since as the basis for resource allocation, national planning and a wide range of other decision-making activities.
In 2017, following a request from President Ghani, UNFPA, WorldPop and the Flowminder Foundation presented to the government of Afghanistan potential approaches for providing more recent and reliable subnational population numbers, based on WorldPop’s previous work in Nigeria. WorldPop researchers worked closely with the Afghan national statistical offices to integrate satellite-based mapping of all residential compounds in the country with other geospatial datasets and recent small area population enumeration in a spatial statistical modelling framework. New population estimates were produced at national, provincial, district, enumeration area and 100m grid cells for the country, with associated measures of uncertainty. Cross-validation showed strong predictive ability, particularly at district and provincial scales.
The results of the population estimation were presented to President Ghani, the government and a range of international agencies in Kabul, and the estimates have been adopted by all UN agencies and many others working in Afghanistan. The new data showed that there were more than a million additional children under the age of five years old in Afghanistan compared to the official projections. This evidence was used to obtain additional funding to purchase sufficient childhood vaccines, and the high-resolution population estimates were used to design and implement vaccine delivery.
