Population mapping in the Angola Cuvelai 2013-2015

Bing and Google Earth images of the whole Basin or catchment area of the Cuvelai drainage system
in Angola were downloaded. Visible houses were mapped, most of them twice by two different
people to check for errors and omissions. Most of the images had been taken between 2011 and
2013.

Houses belonging to Owambo people are distinctive in shape and are also generally large enough to
be easily found and mapped. Each house was mapped as one point.

Households of other tribal groups were less easy to map. The approach taken was to map each
individual hut, clusters of which constitute a household. The centroid point in each cluster was
calculated and that single point was used to map the household. These centroids are labelled as
Centroid) in the Category field of the attribute file, while the original individual huts are labelled as
Non Wambo rural.

Other Owambo households are labelled as Rural. All households in urban areas are labelled
urban in the Category field.

From our household survey data, we used average household sizes of 10 and 6 people for rural and
urban households, respectively.

The data should be credited to Development Workshop (DW), Luanda, Angola.

John Mendelsohn
October 2015.