TechnicalGIS

Western Sahara GIS data sources

Region
Northern Africa
ISO 3166
EH · ESH
Sources
6
Themes
8
Last verified

Where to download GIS data for Western Sahara: 6 sources across 8 themes, led by OCHA / Humanitarian Data Exchange and WorldPop, University of Southampton. 2 offer vector downloads such as Shapefile, GeoPackage or GeoJSON. 6 are under an open licence. Every link was last checked on 18 Oct 2026.

Country atlases

National and OpenStreetMap sources for Western Sahara

Boundaries & admin 1

Administrative boundary data for every country

  • Subnational administrative boundaries (COD-AB) (opens in a new tab)

    Download Cost: Free

    OCHA / Humanitarian Data Exchange · National

    Humanitarian common operational dataset of administrative boundaries for levels 0–1 with P-codes; source: GADM.

    • Boundaries & admin
    Licence
    CC BY 3.0 IGO
    Formats
    File Geodatabase, GeoJSON, Shapefile, XLSX
    Link
    data.humdata.org

    Verified

Imagery 1

Satellite and aerial imagery for every country

  • Digital Earth Africa Map (opens in a new tab)

    Web viewer Cost: Free

    Digital Earth Africa · Africa

    Viewer for analysis-ready Landsat and Sentinel imagery and derived products such as water observations, cropland extent and coastlines; data are also open on AWS.

    • Imagery
    • Land cover
    • Hydrology
    Licence
    CC BY 4.0
    Formats
    GeoTIFF, WMS
    Link
    maps.digitalearth.africa

    Verified

Buildings 2

Building footprint data for every country

  • Copernicus Global Human Settlement Layer (opens in a new tab)

    Download Cost: Free

    European Commission JRC / Humanitarian Data Exchange · National

    Country clip of GHSL built-up surface, population and degree-of-urbanisation grids derived from satellite imagery.

    • Buildings
    • Population
    Licence
    CC BY 4.0
    Formats
    GeoTIFF
    Link
    data.humdata.org

    Verified

  • Google Open Buildings (opens in a new tab)

    Download Cost: Free

    Google Research · Africa, Asia and Latin America

    Building footprint polygons detected from high-resolution imagery, with confidence scores and a 2.5D temporal dataset; download by S2 tile.

    • Buildings
    Licence
    CC BY 4.0 or ODbL 1.0
    Formats
    CSV, GeoJSON
    Link
    sites.research.google

    Verified

Population 1

Gridded population data for every country

  • WorldPop population counts 2015–2030 (opens in a new tab)

    Download Cost: Free

    WorldPop, University of Southampton · National

    Annual gridded estimates of people per ~100 m cell from 2015 to 2030, modelled with random forest dasymetric mapping.

    • Population
    Licence
    CC BY 4.0
    Formats
    GeoTIFF
    Link
    data.humdata.org

    Verified

Agriculture & soils 1

Agriculture and soil data for every country

  • iSDAsoil (opens in a new tab)

    Download Cost: Free

    iSDA · Africa

    Predicted soil properties such as pH, carbon, nitrogen and texture at 30 m resolution for two depths, available as cloud-optimised GeoTIFFs and a map viewer.

    • Agriculture & soils
    • Environment
    Licence
    CC BY 4.0
    Formats
    GeoTIFF
    Link
    isda-africa.com

    Verified

Global datasets that cover Western Sahara

Worldwide and continental layers that include Western Sahara, useful where national data is missing, restricted or inconsistent across borders.

Boundaries & admin
Elevation / DEM
Imagery
Land cover
Buildings
Population
Hydrology
Agriculture & soils
Environment

Browse all 127 global datasets

Tutorials that use this kind of data

Neighbouring countries