The Unseen Population: Underestimation of Slum Dwellers in Cities of the Global South

Abstract

SDG 11 is to reduce poverty. Nevertheless, there are still no reliable estimates, e.g. on slum populations. In this paper, a uniform approach is implemented to obtain slum population estimates in eight different cities from three continents. The approach relies on earth observation datasets including WorldPop-Global. The results shed light on the distribution of population in slums around the world.While these results can be used, e.g. for planning infrastructure measures, the question of their accuracy arises. Therefore, a broad range of literature data containing population counts is gathered for different cities, varying years and on different spatial scales. The literature data is compared to results obtained by the presented approach. The comparison yields a plausibility assessment for different cities, indicating varying levels of deviation. We find that in all cities, slum population is underestimated, even though some cities reveal a significantly better fit to the data. In conclusion, this study provides a methodology of minimum slum population; however, the gap to the actual slum populations are conceptualized and the large uncertainties are empirically shown.

Keywords: slum population, Earth Observation, validation, uniform approach