Small houses in a developing country may be occupied by between 0 and 20 people depending on abandonment, age profile and overcrowding (all of which tend to change more in the short term than construction), and that’s before considering apartments. You might be able to pick up on a few concealed trends like the emergence of new townships in a region which notionally has unchanged population but the margin for error is probably bigger than the apparently huge margin for error in Nigeria’s official population records.
To take the example from the OP: one of the major problems was a census permitting up to 9 people where some regions ended up with every household reporting nine people.Satellite data won’t tell you which houses have claimed more residents than actually exist (or indeed which houses underreport residents because the number of households containing more than nine people won’t be zero)
Small houses in a developing country may be occupied by between 0 and 20 people depending on abandonment, age profile and overcrowding (all of which tend to change more in the short term than construction), and that’s before considering apartments. You might be able to pick up on a few concealed trends like the emergence of new townships in a region which notionally has unchanged population but the margin for error is probably bigger than the apparently huge margin for error in Nigeria’s official population records.
To take the example from the OP: one of the major problems was a census permitting up to 9 people where some regions ended up with every household reporting nine people.Satellite data won’t tell you which houses have claimed more residents than actually exist (or indeed which houses underreport residents because the number of households containing more than nine people won’t be zero)