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Data for Children Collaborative develops Travel Time maps from open data

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The Data for Children Collaborative team has developed a scalable solution for generating travel time maps that uses open data.

The Data for Children Collaborative team, led by Principal Investigator Dr Gary Watmough from the School of Geosciences at the University of Edinburgh, has developed a scalable solution for generating travel maps that uses only free open data, allowing it to be applied to any country in the world.

This work is part of an extension of the Data for Children Collaborative’s successful project with UNICEF which mapped children’s physical accessibility to key services, such as health facilities, clinics, and schools. The main aim of the original work was to establish if travel time to these services could explain the lack of access to that service and its potential relationship to multidimensional childhood poverty.

Building on the original work’s groundbreaking results, the team continued to leverage advanced Geographic Information Systems (GIS) techniques and innovative methods that account for travel time to map a staggering 54 countries across the African continent with the precision of a 100-meter resolution.

The maps are now readily available for public access on the Humanitarian Data Exchange (HDX), providing a critical resource for governments, NGOs, and international agencies.

Dr. Gary Watmough said:

“This innovation not only deepens our understanding of childhood poverty but also ensures the solution is scalable and sustainable. The bespoke software allows for flexible granularity and can be run locally, making it accessible to users worldwide.”

Dr Watmough presented this work at the UN General Assembly in New York in September 2024.

UNICEF Iraq is using the findings from this project to estimate child deprivation from Earth Observation data in a policy document currently being drafted.

The Data for Children Collaborative is a specialist unit at Edinburgh Futures Institute.

Further links and information

More about the original project: Child Poverty Access to Services

Download the Original 20m Travel Maps (original resolution for 4 countries)

Download 100m Resolution Travel Maps for 54 Countries in Africa

Read a Manuscript Describing the Data and Methods

Watch Dr Watmough Explaining the 100m Resolution Methodology

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