WorldPop answers the question that census tables alone can't: where exactly within an administrative unit do people live? Census data tells you a district has 50,000 residents, but not whether they're concentrated in a town center or spread across scattered settlements.
WorldPop uses dasymetric mapping — redistributing census populations based on building footprints, roads, land cover, and settlement patterns detected from satellite imagery — to produce gridded population estimates at 100-meter resolution for every country. The result is a continuous population surface that reflects actual settlement patterns rather than administrative averaging.
This matters practically because most spatial analysis that involves people — disaster impact estimation, health service planning, infrastructure demand modeling, climate exposure assessment — needs to know where populations are concentrated, not just how many people a district contains. WorldPop provides that spatial specificity at a globally consistent resolution, which is especially valuable in developing countries where census data may be old, coarse, or unavailable at sub-district level.
The demographic breakdowns (age, sex, births, poverty) add further analytical depth: a health ministry targeting vaccine campaigns needs to know where children under 5 are concentrated, not just total population. WorldPop complements rather than replaces census data — it needs census totals as input constraints — but it adds the spatial redistribution that turns administrative statistics into usable population surfaces for GIS analysis.
