gabrielmahia/kenya-nowcast

Kenya county-level economic health tracker using satellite nighttime lights — IMF/NBER methodology adapted for East Africa # 🌍 Kenya County Economic Tracker County-level economic health tracker for all 47 Kenya counties — uses satellite nighttime light (VIIRS) following IMF machine-learning methodology to close the lag in sub-Saharan survey data. ## Research Basis - **IMF Working Paper 2026/020** — "Nowcasting Economic Growth with Machine Learning and Satellite Data" (Fotopoulou et al., January 2026). Demonstrates random forest + nighttime satellite data outperforms traditional quarterly GDP models. - **PLOS One 2025** — "Shedding light on development: Leveraging the new nightlights data to measure economic progress" — VIIRS + DMSP harmonized NTL data across 34 Sub-Saharan African countries, 2004-2019. - **Henderson, Storeygard & Weil (NBER 2009)** — "Measuring Economic Growth from Outer Space" — established the NTL-GDP correlation at subnational levels. - **KNBS Kenya County Data** — Kenya National Bureau of Statistics county-level indicators. ## Why This Matters Kenya's statistical system updates county-level data annually at best. In SSA, the average interval between nationally representative surveys is **6.5 years**. Satellite data provides near-real-time economic proxies. This tool applies that methodology at the county level for the first time in a deployable Kenyan app. ## Current Status DEMO with synthetic data representative of county-level patterns. Real implementation uses NASA Black Marble VIIRS data via Google Earth Engine. --- *© 2026 Gabriel Mahia / AI Kung Fu LLC · MIT License* ## IP & Collaboration MIT licensed. Feedback via GitHub Issues only — pull requests are not accepted. Full policy: docs/architecture/IP_POLICY.md. Security reports: see SECURITY.md.