We use this for our healthcare mapping tool health AIM to accurately estimate the population in healthcare “black holes” where we launch health centers.
The problem is that house counts alone doesn’t get you to an accurate population estimate. You need to know the number of people living in each house, which varies wildly between direct staff. We used to use a world bank estimate of 1.8 per hut or something in our area but that’s far too loose to check population estimates.
An interesting method might be to check world pop’s estimates over specific small sample sizes and then physically visit those places and see whether the online counts were consistently higher, lower or similar to the real life counts. I would imagine with a few hundred samples of 15-30 households that might get close to answering the question (can’t be bothered doing the power calculation). Could probably do that for somewhere between 50k and 100k for what it’s worth.
Worldpop has taken this a step further and combined census population counts with house counts to estimate population.
https://www.worldpop.org/
We use this for our healthcare mapping tool health AIM to accurately estimate the population in healthcare “black holes” where we launch health centers.
https://health-aim.onedayhealth.cloud/login
The problem is that house counts alone doesn’t get you to an accurate population estimate. You need to know the number of people living in each house, which varies wildly between direct staff. We used to use a world bank estimate of 1.8 per hut or something in our area but that’s far too loose to check population estimates.
An interesting method might be to check world pop’s estimates over specific small sample sizes and then physically visit those places and see whether the online counts were consistently higher, lower or similar to the real life counts. I would imagine with a few hundred samples of 15-30 households that might get close to answering the question (can’t be bothered doing the power calculation). Could probably do that for somewhere between 50k and 100k for what it’s worth.