‘Leave no one behind’ implies reaching populations that are underrepresented and underserved in development projects. People living in hard-to-reach areas, such as remote riverine regions, natural protected and high elevation areas, deserve special attention as they are often under-reported by traditional data sources and still missed by cell phone data and night- time lights records. Attempts to map and estimate population size in these off-grid, hard-to-reach areas have often been ad-hoc or poorly documented.

This portal, created with the support of the World Bank Trust Fund for Statistical Capaity Building, aims to increase the visibility of off-grid, hard-to-reach populations to various development and adaptation actors by providing information about the location and size of the small settlements/villages through an online interface. It  takes advantage of a combination of very high resolution satellite images, Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI), and modeling. The current focus of this project is on populations living in mangrove areas of West Africa.

Through this portal you can both contribute and obtain information about villages.

Please also see:  Guide to the Portal (pdf) | Final Project Report [coming soon]