Methodology:

For each point, we calculate a ‘staleness’ score which depends solely on its report date. The score represents the depreciation of the point’s relevance – older updates are less valuable than fresh data.

The main parameter that controls this score is the ‘target value’ – for example, in the current state we define that a 20-year-old report is worth only 10% in comparison to a ‘day-old’ report. All other reports are then given values based on their report age using a geometric decay model.

These value assignments are qualitative and are only meant to give a rough estimate of data ‘freshness’.

Limitations:

This analysis is based on the latest available data from the WPdx+ dataset,  population estimates from the Facebook High Resolution Population Datasets and administrative boundaries from GADM or HDX (Eswatini, Ghana and Uganda).

WPdx is an open-source repository for data and contributors include governments, NGOs, academic researchers, and others. WPdx has not directly collected this data or verified the accuracy of the data on the platform. WPdx does perform basic validation checks to ensure that required parameters are included and that GPS locations match with the country boundaries of the provided datasets. Additional cleaning and categorizing steps are taken to prepare the dataset for analysis. Full details of these processes can be found on our website. Questions and feedback are more than welcome.