Monthly night light over your programme settlements.
A radiance layer, an anomaly table and a programme rollup, for the stretch between household surveys.
Spec
- Platform
- coarse-resolution satellite
- Resolution (GSD)
- 250 m or coarser
- Spectral
- panchromatic
- Cadence
- monthly
- Thermal
- none
- Delivery unit
- settlement, by the boundaries you supply
- Formats
- GeoPackage, CSV
- Measures
- night-light radiance, a proxy and not a connection count
The files
- Deliverable
- Monthly radiance layer
- Format
- GeoPackage
- What's in it
- One feature per settlement in your programme area. Each month adds a radiance value, with the date of the night pass it came from and a flag where cloud or moonlight made that month unreliable. Updated monthly, with the months before your project started included as a baseline.
- Cadence
- Monthly
- Deliverable
- Radiance-anomaly table
- Format
- CSV
- What's in it
- One row per settlement per month. Columns hold the radiance, the change against the previous month, and the change against the same settlement's earlier months. Settlements that moved are flagged, so the economist can sort to the ones that lit up, and to the ones that stayed dark after a milestone said they should not have.
- Cadence
- Monthly
- Deliverable
- Programme rollup
- Format
- CSV
- What's in it
- Radiance summed and averaged across the programme area and its districts, month by month. Shaped to drop into a results framework or a supervision report as a proxy indicator, next to the survey-based numbers.
- Cadence
- Monthly
How it works
01In
Supply the settlements
A boundary file or a list of settlements for the programme area, and the month your project started.
02Process
We pull the night passes
Each month we collect the panchromatic night passes over your area and keep the clearest usable one.
03Process
We read each settlement
Radiance is read inside each settlement footprint and compared with that settlement's own earlier months.
04Out
You get the files
The layer, the anomaly table and the rollup, in formats that open in a spreadsheet, R, Stata, QGIS or ArcGIS.
Limits
These are the conditions that change what a month's reading means. Cloud and moonlight are flagged in the delivery.
- Condition
- Proxy, not a count
- Effect on the reading
- Light tracks grid extension and economic activity. It does not count connections, and it cannot tell a household on the grid from a household with a generator or solar lantern next door.
- Condition
- 250 m is the floor
- Effect on the reading
- A settlement has to cover several pixels to read.
- In the delivery
- Small hamlets and individual connections fall below that and do not show.
- Condition
- Cloud and moonlight
- Effect on the reading
- Cloud hides the ground and moonlight lifts the background, so a single month can read low or high for reasons that have nothing to do with the grid.
- In the delivery
- Flagged months are marked, not smoothed.
- Condition
- Overpass timing
- Effect on the reading
- The satellite passes at one time of night. Lights that are switched off before that pass, such as street lighting on a schedule, do not appear in that month.
- Condition
- Light is not only electrification
- Effect on the reading
- Gas flares, fishing fleets, fires, new commercial lighting and mines all add light.
- In the delivery
- A rise in radiance is a prompt to look, not a finding that a financed line caused it.
- Condition
- Monthly is a target
- Effect on the reading
- The reading for a month is the clearest usable night pass in it.
- In the delivery
- Some months have no usable pass and show as gaps.
Why this exists
Between household surveys the economist is reading a contractor's certificate of completion and national statistics that lag by years. The results framework asks whether new areas are lit at the milestone, and the last look at the ground may be a supervision mission some time back. A monthly light series over the financed settlements gives you something to put beside the baseline, before the endline survey confirms or contradicts it.
Who it's for
For
- Portfolio economists and results-framework owners at development banks, tracking financed grid extension.
- Monitoring and evaluation teams that want a monthly proxy to read between disbursement milestones and the next survey.
Not for
- Teams that need an electrification rate or a household connection count. That takes a survey.
- Teams that want to predict poverty or score impact from light.
- Mini-grid or off-grid projects serving hamlets smaller than the pixel.
- Teams that want a live feed. The cadence is monthly.
Questions from the monitoring team
Is night-light intensity the same as an electrification rate?
No. It is a light-based proxy that tends to move with grid extension. It is not a connection count and the page never gives you one.
What does 250 m resolution miss?
Individual household connections and small hamlets. The reading is at settlement scale, so a village that covers only a pixel or two is a weak signal.
Can this replace a household survey?
No. It is a monthly proxy between formal surveys. The endline still tells you what households have.
What causes false negatives?
Cloud, moonlight and overpass timing can suppress a single month's reading. Those months are flagged in the layer so you can discount them.
How current is monthly?
The clearest usable night pass in that month. It is not a live feed.
Can we check it against our own survey data?
Yes. The settlement table keys on the IDs you supply, so you can join it to your baseline survey and compare change over the same period. Tell us where your ground truth sits when the project is scoped.
Who owns the files you deliver?
Use and ownership terms for the delivered files are written into the contract before work starts. The public satellite archives behind the layer keep their own licences.
How is it priced, and how do we buy it?
Each programme area is scoped and quoted on its own: the number of settlements, the history you want and the months going forward. You get a written scope to take through the bank's procurement.
Put the radiance series in your next supervision report.
Send the settlement list and we will tell you what the record looks like for your area.
Start a project