Ghana Building Footprints from OpenStreetMap for Urban Planning

OpenStreetMap exports provide building footprints across Ghana, including residential homes, hospitals, schools, and places of worship. The Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) compiled this data, last updated on 2026-05-15. Completeness varies by region, with urban areas typically well-mapped and remote areas potentially incomplete.

Use Cases

• Population estimation based on building density and type.
• Damage assessment for disaster response using building footprint locations.
• Urban planning analysis leveraging the spatial distribution of residential and public buildings.

Strengths

• Includes every OpenStreetMap feature tagged as a building (`building=*`).
• Covers multiple building types, from residential homes to hospitals and schools.
• Data is available in multiple geospatial formats, including GEOPACKAGE, SHP, and JSON.

Limitations

• Completeness varies by region; remote areas may be incomplete.
• 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-contributed mapping via the OpenStreetMap platform.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-05-15.

Geography

Ghana