mWater maintains a comprehensive global database of geographical administrative boundaries for free public use.
This means both that users can create and share geospatial analyses based on these map boundaries in combination with any data they collect as part of their work.
Each mapped location or site in mWater can automatically calculate which boundaries they belong to. So a water well mapped in rural Kenya with specific GPS coordinates will automatically show which exact ward, constituency and county it is in.
When performing data analysis and visualization, this allows users to effectively summarize data across areas by running queries such as:
- How many water points are there in a given constituency?
- How many water systems are there in the entire country, split by county?
- How many households did we survey by region, and what was the average income of each region?
You can also display the administrative boundaries directly on a map, and colour the areas based on data that is located within those boundaries. So mWater allows you to quickly count together the number of people with piped water access, for example, by county and show that on a map.
mWater's admin boundaries are sourced from the Database of Administrative Areas (
GADM), and only include official administrative boundaries as recognized by the governments represented. The boundaries for a country are refreshed whenever when a government contacts us to say a border is out of date. We only update boundaries from national statistics bureaus to maintain a high standard of quality.