Building Footprints Across Kenya for Population and Damage Assessment

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

Use Cases

• Estimate population distribution based on building density and type.
• Assess damage to infrastructure after disasters using building footprint data.
• Plan urban development and service allocation using the spatial distribution of buildings.
• Analyze the mix of building types (e.g., residential, institutional) for regional studies.

Strengths

• Includes a wide variety of building types, from homes to hospitals and schools.
• Sourced from OpenStreetMap, a free, collaborative global mapping project.
• Available in multiple geospatial formats, including GEOPACKAGE, SHP, and JSON.

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 for large-scale modeling.

Provenance

Source

OpenStreetMap

Collection Method

Collaborative volunteer mapping

Time Range

null

Freshness

Last updated 2026-06-19 11:02:01.274036; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Kenya