Access to Infrastructure and Population Density Estimation in Refugee Camps

Chad, Ethiopia, Sudan , Uganda, Cameroon

Context and issues

Gaining knowledge on refugee camps is critical to provide appropriate assistance and satellite imagery associated with open data can help clear up blind spots.

Solution

Masae used night-time lights images and road data to estimate electricity grids of several African countries.

Then, the team was able to compute the distance from camps to grid and tarred roads, in order to assess their access to infrastructure.

Thanks to open data and satellite images, Masae also managed to delineate camp boundaries to estimate their population density and in some cases count the number of buildings to estimate the number of refugees per building.