Populated Places and Settlements of Kenya from OpenStreetMap

Populated Places of Kenya is a geospatial dataset of settlements and residential areas, including named cities, towns, villages, and suburbs. The data is derived from OpenStreetMap tags for place and residential landuse and was last updated on 2026-06 19. It is provided by the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) on the HDX platform.

Use Cases

• Providing demographic context for regional planning based on settlement locations.
• Settlement-level targeting for aid or development programs based on populated place data.
• Conducting population distribution analysis using the residential landuse and place features.

Strengths

• Data is sourced from OpenStreetMap, a free, collaborative world map.
• Available in multiple geospatial formats including GEOPACKAGE, SHP, and GEOJSON.
• Dataset was updated on 2026-06-19, suggesting recent maintenance.

Limitations

• Coverage reflects volunteer mapper activity; 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

Collaborative mapping by volunteers, tagged with `place=*` and `landuse=residential`.

Time Range

Coverage reflects mapping activity up to the last update date.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-06-19 11:06:42.816872.

Geography

Kenya