WorldPop Projects

Mapping for Health in Democratic Republic of Congo

Project lead: Attila Lazar

Team: Gianluca Boo, Heather Chamberlain, Édith Darin, Chris Jochem, Alexandra Frosch

Funding: Flowminder and Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance

Start: Nov 2020

Completion: Oct 2021

The Mapping For Health (M4H) project supported the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Mashako Plan to improve the country’s very low immunisation coverage, by creating high-resolution population estimates and other outputs.

Our project team developed a custom Bayesian population model for the nine priority provinces in DRC, produced population estimates at 100x100m grid square scale and aggregations to administrative unit levels and associated measures of uncertainty. As part of the model development, we supported the design and implementation of microcensus survey activities.

The model methodologies, validation and results were disseminated to stakeholders and published in peer-reviewed publications and on open access data servers.

Outputs from this project include: 

  • A microcensus survey 
  • Dataset processing
  • Geospatial covariates
  • A novel Bayesian population model 
  • Population estimates