AFRICA CITIES POPULATION DATABASE (ACPD)

The African Cities Population Database (ACPD) has been produced by the
Birkbeck College of the University of London in 1990 at the request of
the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) in Nairobi, Kenya.
The database contains head counts for 479 cities in Africa which either
have a population of over 20,000 or are capitals of their nation state.
Listed are the geographical location of the cities and their population
sizes. The material is primarily derived from a 1988 report of the
Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) and several issues of the United
Nations Demographic Yearbook (1973-81). Severe problems were found with
several countries such as Togo, Ghana and South Africa. For South Africa,
the data were derived from the United Nations Demographic Yearbook 1987.

WCPD is an Arc/Info point coverage. It has no projection, as the cities
are located on the basis of their latitude and longitude. Coordinates
were assigned on the basis of gazetteers or African maps. Each record
in the data base contains details of the city name, country name,
latitude and longitude of the city, and its population at a defined
time. The Arc/Info attribute table contains the following fields:

AREA Arc/Info item
PERIMETER Arc/Info item
ACPD# Arc/Info item
ACPD-ID Arc/Info item
ID-NUM Unique number for each city
CITY City name
COUNTRY Country name
CITY-POP Population of city proper
YEAR Latest available year of collection

ACPD comes as an Arc/Info EXPORT file originally called "ACPD.E00" and
contains 67 Kb of data. The file has a record length of 80 and a block
size of 8000 (blocking factor = 100). The file can be read from tape
using Arc/Info's TAPEREAD command or any other generic copy utility.
If distributed on a diskette it can be read using the ordinary DOS 'COPY'
command. The file has to be converted to Arc/Info internal format using
its IMPORT command.

References to the WCPD data set can be found in:

- SERLL News, Issue No. 1, January 1991, Birkbeck College, London, UK.
- D. Rhind. "Cartographically-related research at Birkbeck College
1987-91" in: The Cartographic Journal, Vol. 28, June 1991, pp. 63-66.

The source of the WCPD data set as held by GRID is Birkbeck College,
University of London, Department of Geography, London, UK.