Missing villages in Tanzania III – The plan

Facts: 

• The population in Tanzania was 44,929,000 in 2011/2012 (census data). 
• Tanzania 2020 population is estimated at 59,734,218 people at mid year according to UN data.
• Gates data was created by using satellite images of different vintages 

This method is easy to implement for a smaller area (for example 500 km2). Better usable for urbanized environments. It takes a lot more work for the whole country.

1. Census 2012 – data was recorded in 2011. Get satellite pictures from 2011 and calculate the human traces of activity.
2. Using the Bill Gates data – check the year, when maxar satellite pictures were taken, get a sentinel from that year and calculate the human traces of activity.
3. Compare the two maps we can estimate the difference (increase / decrease), so to use data from the census, we can estimate the population number by the time the Gates data was created. 
4. Using the Bill Gates data – calculate an average “number of people/house” in ward level. 
5. For those villages, where we have a village boundary and village name as well, I will count the number of buildings and calculate the population laid inside the village boundary.

This can help to estimate the population number and population distribution in a certain area as the domestic migration. Of course, we could compare two images from 2020 and 2021 and see how the proportion of populated areas has changed, but it would not be a good idea to calculate the population of larger villages based on this, max it would work for ward level.