Population data is crucial for effective humanitarian operations, helping organizations understand who needs what type of assistance and where. However, in many crisis-affected regions, reliable population data is often outdated or unavailable. Seventy-five percent of countries with a UN inter-agency humanitarian response plan have not conducted a national census in over a decade, and for a third of these, it’s been more than 20 years.
To address this gap, the Humanitarian Data Exchange (HDX) platform, managed by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), has partnered with Meta to enhance access to timely population data. Meta’s High-Resolution Population Density Maps, powered by AI and satellite imagery, provide estimates of population numbers within a 30-meter grid, including demographic information such as the number of children under five and women of reproductive age. These maps have become a vital tool for humanitarian organizations, such as the World Health Organization, which used them to vaccinate 5,000 children in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and World Vision, which used the data to deliver clean water to numerous locations worldwide.
