A malaria mapping project in Nairobi and Oxford has provided an unexpected benefit to MapAction's readiness for humanitarian emergencies in East Africa, in the form of detailed population maps of the region. This fills a missing information element in many disasters, which is a reliable indication of how many people are affected in a given area.

Population data are often sparse in disaster-prone countries, so MapAction uses a variety of sources from around the world. The most recent of these is a set of digital files showing the number of people estimated to inhabit each 100 x 100 metre grid square across East Africa - Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda are included.

The Malaria Atlas Project created the new dataset by combining census, settlement and land cover information, in order to help its global project to map malaria risk - details of their methods are here.

For MapAction, having such information ready in position greatly reduces the time needed to research, obtain and check new data should a disaster strike.  Base maps such as population distribution can then be overlaid with disaster-related information such as flood extents to create rapid information tools for the humanitarian response community.