In this article Worldpop's and Flowminder's work on mapping migration in low and middle income countries and its relation to the spread of infectious diseases is presented. Professor Andy Tatem, Director of WorldPop and Dr Alessandro Sorichetta are cited in this article.
According to figures from the IOM and The World Bank, more than one billion people live outside their place of origin – 740 million as 'internal migrants'. Human mobility is expected to continue to rise, creating a range of impacts, such as invasive species, drug resistance spread and disease pandemics.
Researchers from the WorldPop project and from the Flowminder Foundation have, for the first time, mapped estimated internal migration in countries across three continents; Africa, Asia and Latin America and the Caribbean. The researchers have used census micro-data to model estimates of migration flows within countries and then produced a series of maps to visually represent the data. The research paper 'Mapping internal connectivity through human migration in malaria endemic countries' published in Scientific Data details the methods they employed, and presents the freely available data.