Populated Places of the Democratic Republic of the Congo from OpenStreetMap

OpenStreetMap volunteer contributions identify cities, towns, villages, and residential areas across the Democratic Republic of the Congo. This dataset, sourced from the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team, is useful for settlement-level targeting and population analysis. Coverage reflects mapper activity, with urban areas likely well-represented and remote areas potentially sparse.

Use Cases

• Mapping settlement distribution for demographic analysis based on the described place and landuse tags.
• Targeting humanitarian or development interventions based on identified populated places.
• Conducting population density studies based on the residential landuse data.
• Cross-referencing local field knowledge for validation of remote mapping efforts.

Strengths

• Data is derived from OpenStreetMap, a free, collaborative global mapping project.
• Available in multiple geospatial formats including GeoPackage, Shapefile, and GeoJSON.
• Last updated on 2026-06-19, indicating recent maintenance.

Limitations

• Coverage is dependent on volunteer mapper activity, leading to potential sparsity in remote areas.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count and dataset size are unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.

Provenance

Source

OpenStreetMap

Collection Method

Volunteer-contributed mapping (collaborative world map).

Time Range

null

Freshness

Last updated 2026-06-19 09:40:12.099349

Geography

Democratic Republic of the Congo