Travel Time Accessibility to Schools Across Africa at 90m Resolution

This dataset contains modelled travel time to the nearest school across Africa at 90 m spatial resolution and accompanies the analysis presented in: Jaramillo-Araujo, D., & Hall, J. W. (2026). Mapping School Accessibility in Africa: High-Resolution Spatial Analysis Uncovers Inequalities in Education Access. Sustainable Development. https://doi.org/10.1002/sd.… (in production).

Travel times were estimated using a least-cost path accessibility model applied to a friction surface representing walking speeds across land cover, transport networks, and terrain. The dataset provides a high-resolution estimate of physical accessibility to schools and improves upon previous continental analyses conducted at coarser spatial resolutions.

Travel times were calculated using a cost-distance accessibility model implemented in AccessMod (https://www.accessmod.org/). Data preparation, processing, and analysis were conducted using a Python- and R-based Snakemake workflow. The accompanying GitHub repository is available dianajjaramillo/schools-acc….

A full description of the methodology, modelling assumptions, and datasets used is available in the accompanying publication. Users should review the Limitations discussed in the publication before using this dataset.

 

Dataset specifications

Spatial coverage: African continent, clipped to country boundaries
Spatial resolution: 90 m (~3 arc-seconds)
Coordinate reference system: WGS84 (EPSG:4326)
File format: GeoTIFF
File naming convention:schools_traveltime_walking__{ISO3}.tif
Units: estimated travel time to nearest school (minutes)
Data type: UInt16
NoData value: 65535