Populated Places of Nigeria from OpenStreetMap, Including Cities and Villages

OpenStreetMap data for Nigerian settlements, including named cities, towns, villages, suburbs, and residential areas. The dataset is derived from a free, collaborative world map and is maintained by the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team, with a last recorded update on 2026-06-25. Coverage likely reflects areas where volunteer mappers have been active, potentially leading to better representation of urban over remote regions.

Use Cases

• Providing demographic context for regional planning based on settlement locations and types.
• Settlement-level targeting for aid or development projects based on populated place data.
• Population distribution analysis using the spatial distribution of residential areas.

Strengths

• Data is sourced from OpenStreetMap, a widely-used collaborative mapping project.
• Covers multiple settlement types including cities, towns, villages, and suburbs.
• Available in multiple geospatial formats including GEOPACKAGE, SHP, and GEOJSON.

Limitations

• Coverage is dependent on volunteer mapper activity, which may result in sparse data for remote areas.
• 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

Freshness

Last updated 2026-06-25 22:55:15.686869; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Nigeria