290 million building footprints with height and use estimates, plus harmonized admin-0 to admin-3 boundaries for 54 African countries, extracted from 50 cm imagery and refreshed yearly.
Data product · Listing updated 11 Nov 2026
Africa
290 million buildings in 54 countries, four boundary levels
Small and medium businesses, Mid-market, Enterprises, Public sector, Academia and research
50 cm partner imagery, open boundary sources and national statistics office maps
Deep-learning footprint extraction with manual QA on sampled tiles; boundaries harmonized to national gazettes
A consistent building and boundary layer for a continent where official maps are often incomplete.
Building footprint polygons with area, estimated height, estimated use class (residential, commercial, industrial or unknown), detection confidence and the date of the source imagery. A matching boundary layer provides country, first-, second- and, where available, third-level administrative areas with names, codes and parent links, harmonized to a single schema across 54 countries.
Footprints are extracted from 50 cm partner imagery with deep-learning segmentation models, followed by manual quality checks on randomly sampled tiles in every country. Precision is around 89% and recall varies with roof material and density, so we publish per-country quality notes. Heights come from shadow analysis and stereo pairs where available and are estimates. Boundaries are compiled from open sources and national statistics office maps and reconciled to national gazettes where they exist; disputed borders are flagged rather than resolved. The layer is refreshed yearly, with priority countries updated twice a year. No information about building occupants is included.
14 fields as documented by Altimètre Earth Observation.
| Field | Type | Description | Example |
|---|---|---|---|
| building_id | string | Altimètre building ID | — |
| country_code | string | ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 code | — |
| admin1_code | string | First-level administrative area code | — |
| admin2_code | string | Second-level administrative area code | — |
| area_m2 | number | Footprint area in square metres | — |
| height_m_est | number | Estimated building height in metres | — |
| use_class_est | string | residential, commercial, industrial or unknown | — |
| confidence | number | Detection confidence from 0 to 1 | — |
| imagery_date | date | Capture date of the source imagery | — |
| geometry | geometry | Footprint or boundary polygon | — |
| boundary_id | string | Administrative boundary ID | — |
| admin_level | integer | Boundary level from 0 to 3 | — |
| boundary_name | string | Official or common name of the area | — |
| parent_boundary_id | string | ID of the containing area | — |
Real rows from the provider's sample file. Personal data is masked before anything is shown.
| building_idstring | country_codestring | admin2_codestring | area_m2string | height_m_eststring | use_class_eststring | confidencestring |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| bf_KE_000184221 | KE | KE-047-01 | 142.6 | 6.5 | residential | 0.93 |
| bf_NG_010733990 | NG | NG-LA-12 | 1840.0 | 11.0 | commercial | 0.88 |
| bf_SN_000421777 | SN | SN-DK-03 | 96.3 | 3.5 | residential | 0.81 |
Prices in USD, as published by Altimètre Earth Observation
one country, footprints and boundaries
all 54 countries with yearly refresh
Converted amounts use DataStoa display rates and are approximate. Altimètre Earth Observation quotes the final price, taxes and terms.
Request detailed pricingAfrica.
Time coverage: 2019 to present.
Provider-reported
DataStoa has not audited these figures. Ask the provider how they are measured, or test them on a sample.
The licence is agreed directly between you and Altimètre Earth Observation. This summary is provider-reported; the linked terms prevail.
Not listed: AI / ML model training, AI retrieval and grounding, redistribution allowed, marketing and outreach. Ask Altimètre Earth Observation if you need any of these.
Satellite archive, crop analytics and building footprints from orbit
Altimètre resells a 50 cm optical archive from partner constellations and turns imagery into analytics: crop types and yields in Europe and the Black Sea region, and building footprints across Africa. Imagery and derived layers come with full capture metadata and licence terms per scene.
Also available on: AWS Data Exchange, Microsoft Azure
What buyers say about Altimètre Earth Observation. Reviews cover the provider, not only this listing.
from 2 reviews
Crop-type maps for our Black Sea regions agreed with our agronomists' field visits on the large majority of parcels. Yield estimates are most useful as a trend through the season rather than an absolute number early on.
Yusuf A., Agricultural commodities analyst, Grain trading house
We needed 50 cm imagery over three construction corridors with low cloud cover. They shortlisted scenes, sent previews the same afternoon and delivered orthorectified tiles two days later. Licence terms for sharing with our client were clear.
Camille R., Geospatial analyst, Infrastructure engineering firm