{"database":"biostudies-literature","file_versions":[],"scores":null,"additional":{"omics_type":["Unknown"],"volume":["645(8080)"],"submitter":["Bettencourt LMA"],"pubmed_abstract":["Sustainable development is an imperative worldwide<sup>1-3</sup> but metrics and data on poverty and quality of life have remained too coarse and abstract to characterize challenges adequately and guide practical progress<sup>4,5</sup>. Nowhere is this challenge greater than in Africa<sup>4-6</sup>, where we still know little about the spatial details of development<sup>3,7-9</sup>. Here we leverage a comprehensive, high-precision dataset of building footprints to identify infrastructure deficits and infer informal settlements down to the street block level<sup>10-12</sup> everywhere in sub-Saharan Africa. We identify a general pattern of informality with cities showing, on average, greater access to infrastructure and services than rural and peri-urban areas. We show that such patterns of informality are characterized by consistent statistical distributions reflecting uneven local development<sup>2,13,14</sup>. We also show that these physical measures of informality are systematically associated with many indicators of human deprivation, which form a single principal component co-varying predictably with specific changes in street access to buildings. These results demonstrate that the localization of sustainable development is possible down to the street level at a continental scale and provide a general distributed strategy for accelerating progress in infrastructure and service expansion that taps local innovations in systematic, equitable and context-appropriate ways<sup>7,11,12,15</sup>."],"journal":["Nature"],"pagination":["399-406"],"full_dataset_link":["https://www.ebi.ac.uk/biostudies/studies/S-EPMC12422982"],"repository":["biostudies-literature"],"pubmed_title":["Infrastructure deficits and informal settlements in sub-Saharan Africa."],"pmcid":["PMC12422982"],"pubmed_authors":["Bettencourt LMA","Marchio N"],"additional_accession":[]},"is_claimable":false,"name":"Infrastructure deficits and informal settlements in sub-Saharan Africa.","description":"Sustainable development is an imperative worldwide<sup>1-3</sup> but metrics and data on poverty and quality of life have remained too coarse and abstract to characterize challenges adequately and guide practical progress<sup>4,5</sup>. Nowhere is this challenge greater than in Africa<sup>4-6</sup>, where we still know little about the spatial details of development<sup>3,7-9</sup>. Here we leverage a comprehensive, high-precision dataset of building footprints to identify infrastructure deficits and infer informal settlements down to the street block level<sup>10-12</sup> everywhere in sub-Saharan Africa. We identify a general pattern of informality with cities showing, on average, greater access to infrastructure and services than rural and peri-urban areas. We show that such patterns of informality are characterized by consistent statistical distributions reflecting uneven local development<sup>2,13,14</sup>. We also show that these physical measures of informality are systematically associated with many indicators of human deprivation, which form a single principal component co-varying predictably with specific changes in street access to buildings. These results demonstrate that the localization of sustainable development is possible down to the street level at a continental scale and provide a general distributed strategy for accelerating progress in infrastructure and service expansion that taps local innovations in systematic, equitable and context-appropriate ways<sup>7,11,12,15</sup>.","dates":{"release":"2025-01-01T00:00:00Z","publication":"2025 Sep","modification":"2026-06-03T02:20:50.081Z","creation":"2026-04-23T03:10:15.634Z"},"accession":"S-EPMC12422982","cross_references":{"pubmed":["40903581"],"doi":["10.1038/s41586-025-09465-2"]}}