Hi, What is a useful source for administrative/district-level (e.g. level 2) population counts in African countrie

Hi,

What is a useful source for administrative/district-level (e.g. level 2) population counts in African countries (1960s-today)? While IPUMS has great information, I can only see samples of multiple censuses from African countries, not the censuses themselves. Maybe I am missing something? I would like either full censuses that contain the district of birth, which I would then aggregate up, or population counts by district. I wonder if there is a resource that groups the data provided by various censuses at a low-level administrative unit, like districts.

Thank you for your help,

Joan

You can use IPUMS International for this task. There may be other sources available, perhaps the World Bank or the IMF, but I am not certain. In general, census data is collected on a sample of the population. This is typically done in a representative manner and therefore population estimates can be calculated by use of a sampling weight variable. (Note: For more general information on sampling weights, see this IPUMS blog post.) So, using IPUMS International data you can calculate population estimates at the GEOLEV2 boundary level while using the person level sampling weight variable, PERWT.

I hope this helps. Let us know if you have any additional questions.