Geographic Boundaries

FEWS NET maintains current and historical national and subnational administrative boundaries for FEWS NET-monitored countries. These geospatial data resources identify the geographic boundaries of administrative divisions within a given country. FEWS NET monitors changes to administrative boundaries over time and uses these shapefiles to develop various FEWS NET mapping products (e.g., acute food insecurity classification maps, livelihood zone maps, trade route activity, and market functioning maps).

In addition to administrative boundaries, FEWS NET also produces food security classification (FSC) mapping units. These are the units of analysis at which FEWS NET classifies acute food insecurity. The FSC units are often the intersection between administrative units and livelihood zones. In some cases, they may be the administrative units of a country or the livelihood zones themselves.

The administrative boundary files are gathered from various sources, including the Food and Agriculture Organization's Global Administrative Unit Layers (FAO-GAUL), Database of Global Administrative Areas (GADM), the Humanitarian Data Exchange, and from local and regional partners. FEWS NET standardizes all administrative boundary files to align with international borders and remove any gaps or overlaps between the units. 

The administrative boundaries and FSC units are linked to the time periods specified in the dataset names. For historical datasets, the name will include a range of years, such as “2009 - 2012.” Current datasets will use the notation “From [Year],” for example, “From 2013.” For administrative boundaries, the years indicate when the country’s divisions matched those in the dataset. In the FSC unit datasets, the years indicate when FEWS NET used the specified units to identify acute food insecurity in the country.

Each geographic unit is assigned a unique alpha-numeric ID for FEWS NET reference, called an “FNID.” All data files include standardized English names and aliases. Standard French, Spanish, and Portuguese names are included in the files when one of these languages is an official language of the related country. FEWS NET uses standard names from the GEOnet Names Server database for countries and administrative levels where names are available. In most cases, these spellings are also reviewed by national staff and adjusted based on local knowledge and standards.