High-resolution population mapping and estimation in the western part of the Democratic Republic of Congo

According to the United Nations, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is the fourth most populous country in Africa. Yet, accurate demographic figures are currently unavailable because the last national census was conducted over three decades ago. This situation has shown to be critical to policymaking and intervention planning in the domain of public health. In the western part of the country, for instance, human African trypanosomiasis is highly endemic but accurate sub-national population figures are required for effective disease mapping. This work aims at producing gridded population estimates with a 100 meters spatial resolution for the five most western provinces of DRC. In doing so, we adopt a bottom-up modeling approach incorporating demographic data from recent micro-census surveys and various geospatial datasets in a Bayesian hierarchical framework. The resulting high-resolution population estimates and associated uncertainty measures are meant to inform spatial epidemiological applications in the region and foster the use of similar modeling approaches in other parts of the country