African Administrative Boundaries at Four Hierarchical Levels

Administrative boundaries for Africa at continental, national, and second and third administrative levels. The dataset was developed by UNEP, FAO, and ESRI, published in December 1984. It provides vector polygon coverage in geographic latitude/longitude coordinates.

Use Cases

• Mapping and analyzing population distribution using the hierarchical administrative unit polygons.
• Studying historical land use changes by overlaying the 1984 administrative boundaries with other geospatial layers.
• Creating base maps for regional economic or environmental models that require second and third-level administrative divisions.
• Validating or comparing contemporary administrative datasets against this historical reference coverage.

Strengths

• Covers the entire continent of Africa with four levels of administrative detail.
• Digitized with a spatial resolution of 0.002 inches from authoritative base maps.

Limitations

• Data is temporally stale, representing administrative boundaries circa 1984, which may not reflect current divisions.
• The original Arc/Info Export format (E00) is legacy and requires specific tools or conversion for modern use.

Provenance

Source

United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI).

Collection Method

Digitized from base maps including the FAO/UNESCO Soil Map of the World (1977), re-registered and transformed to latitude/longitude.

Time Range

Publication date is December 1984; source maps date from 1975-1983.

Freshness

null

Geography

Continent of Africa.