Planning for elections, disease incidence rates, assessing exposure to natural hazards, measuring demand for services, modelling epidemic spreads, and monitoring progress towards development goals – underlying these activities and others is the need for contemporary, accurate, and reliable subnational level data on population sizes and demographic characteristics. Through the integration of ‘traditional’ data from censuses, official estimates and projections, and surveys with digital administrative boundaries, satellite imagery, and geospatial environmental and infrastructure data, this project filled emerging data gaps and improved the spatial detail, timeliness, consistency, and accuracy of demographic data.

The substantial growth in use of WorldPop demographic data, particularly for health, humanitarian- and development-related applications, models and platforms, led to a major rise in custom requests for maintenance and updates, and in particular, projections beyond 2020. This project met the growing demand from the scientific, operational and governmental communities that are reliant on our data. Multiple organisations that already rely on our global data, including most UN agencies, the World Bank, Wellcome Trust, Esri, GAVI, Google, The Global Fund, GRID3, CHAI and USAID, had requested updates and improvements.

Project activities were designed to complement, integrate with, and support our work in GRID3, where more in-depth government-driven country-focused demographic modelling, stakeholder engagement and capacity strengthening are undertaken, typically relying and building upon the architecture developed and datasets produced in our global mapping work.

The project addressed our commonly received categories of requests. These included small area updates (including forecasts) and increased age group breakdown flexibility. In each case, the project focused on ensuring that our global mapping work was updated, made more accessible, and included improved documentation. We also improved opportunities for training, co-development of methods and use of the data.

Project outputs include:

• Updated and expanded data to meet evolving end-user requirements.
  • Updates, including forecasts of global gridded age/sex-structured population estimates to 2030.
  • Expanding age group breakdowns.
• Improved access and reduced barriers to the use of gridded population/demographic datasets and methods.
  • Expanded accessibility and usability of demographic datasets.
  • Improved documentation, communications and develop training materials.