Estimating Fine-Grained Population Growth Rates from Coarse Census Data

Fine-grained population estimation is important for several domains, such as urban planning, public health, and humanitarian action. Due to limited resources, population maps with sufficient spatial resolution and temporal frequency are not available for many developing countries. Population estimates are often based on statistics available at the national or provincial level, which moreover are updated infrequently. The United Nations produce estimates of population growth rates, which are widely used to project population numbers to a target year, starting from the most recent census data. However, they use a simplified model of population growth with uniform growth rates for all urban, respectively rural areas within a country. This neglects the complex dynamics of population growth (e.g., growth rates in big cities are usually larger than in smaller urban areas) and leads to significant errors in population projections. In this work, we propose a methodology to estimate fine-grained population growth rates and present experimental results for Mozambique.