In order to better understand the villages in west africa fighting the ebola outbreak currently occurring there, it would be good to have better population data for the towns. One way to do this is to measure the number of buildings per square mile in a typical vilage and then just map a “perimeter” residential landuse area around a village and then work out how many buildings there should be based on the size of the area.

I have been experimenting with this a bit using the data mapped in OSM. As of the time I made this dataset we had 43 small villages in this area that had all of their buildings mapped, as well as a footprint to measure the area. I calculated an average building density of 0.00418 buildings per square meter. Then using this figure I pretended I didn’t know the number of buildings in the town and then re-computed how many there should likely be based on the area. The results are in the graph below, and look quite good.

If the method worked perfectly they should fall exactly on a line with the predicted number being exactly equal to the actual number. Of course in reality the prediction is not perfect but it does look pretty good.