Building Footprints Across Ethiopia from OpenStreetMap

Ethiopia's building footprints are derived from OpenStreetMap, where every feature is tagged with `building=*`. The dataset includes structures ranging from residential homes to hospitals, schools, and places of worship. It was last updated on 2026-06-19 by the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT).

Use Cases

• Estimate population distribution based on building density and type.
• Assess damage to infrastructure after a disaster based on building footprint changes.
• Plan urban development and service allocation based on the spatial distribution of buildings.
• Analyze the prevalence of specific building types, such as schools or hospitals, across regions.

Strengths

• Covers a wide variety of building types, from residential to institutional, as indicated by the `building=*` tag.
• Sourced from OpenStreetMap, a free, collaborative world map, suggesting community-vetted data.
• Available in multiple geospatial formats (GEOPACKAGE, SHP, JSON) for flexibility.

Limitations

• Coverage is uneven, reflecting volunteer mapper activity; urban areas are likely well-represented while remote areas may be sparse.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.

Provenance

Source

OpenStreetMap

Collection Method

Volunteer mapping and collaborative contributions.

Time Range

null

Freshness

Last updated 2026-06-19 10:30:30.240149; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Ethiopia