Polio is a highly infectious disease caused by a virus that can cause total paralysis in a matter of hours. Mass vaccination campaigns since the 1950s has eliminated wild poliovirus from many parts of the World by 2000, but it remained prevalent in parts of Africa. Across the 2010s Nigeria had the largest reservoir of virus, with evidence of cases being exported to other countries across the continent. Efforts were therefore made to step up vaccination rates, particularly in hotspots across northern Nigeria. The campaigns initially used official population estimates that were projected from the 2006 census to assess how much vaccine would be needed and where to distribute it. Vaccination teams however quickly found that these population data were inaccurate, with many children missing.

Starting in 2015, WorldPop partnered with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Oak Ridge National Laboratories to support polio elimination efforts in Nigeria through the development of census-independent population mapping methods in the north of the country, making use of satellite imagery. The small area estimates produced fed into vaccination plans and tracking systems, were found to be substantially more accurate than census projections, and in some cases resulted in remote communities being mapped and counted for the first time.