Mapping internal connectivity through human migration in malaria endemic countries

Sorichetta, Alessandro and Bird, Tom J. and Ruktanonchai, Nick W. and Zu Erbach-Schoenberg, Elisabeth and Pezzulo, Carla and Tejedor, Natalia and Waldock, Ian C. and Sadler, Jason D. and Garcia, Andres J. and Sedda, Luigi and Tatem, Andrew J. (2016) Mapping internal connectivity through human migration in malaria endemic countries. Scientific Data, 3: 160066. ISSN 2052-4463

Abstract

Human mobility continues to increase in terms of volumes and reach, producing growing global connectivity. This connectivity hampers efforts to eliminate infectious diseases such as malaria through reintroductions of pathogens, and thus accounting for it becomes important in designing global, continental, regional, and national strategies. Recent works have shown that census-derived migration data provides a good proxy for internal connectivity, in terms of relative strengths of movement between administrative units, across temporal scales. To support global malaria eradication strategy efforts, here we describe the construction of an open access archive of estimated internal migration flows in endemic countries built through pooling of census microdata. These connectivity datasets, described here along with the approaches and methods used to create and validate them, are available both through the WorldPop website and the WorldPop Dataverse Repository.