Portal

Africa Road Accessibility

H3 Res 7 • OSM • Euclidean distance to nearest highway / major road

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Use this data via API

POST an area of interest • get population-weighted distance-to-road back

Beyond viewing the map, you can query this dataset programmatically for your own area — a neighborhood boundary, a study catchment, any custom shapefile — instead of reading values off the map by hand. Every request needs an API key sent as an X-API-Key header.

POST /precise-api/api/euclidean/query
Population-weighted distance to the nearest highway (hw) and major road (mr) for a custom AOI. Submit a GeoJSON polygon or a zipped shapefile (.shp/.dbf/.shx). Add ?include_cells=true to also get the matched H3 cells back as GeoJSON.
curl -X POST https://portal.placealert.org/precise-api/api/euclidean/query \ -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY" \ -F 'geojson={"type":"Polygon","coordinates":[[[27.4,-29.4],[27.6,-29.4],[27.6,-29.2],[27.4,-29.2],[27.4,-29.4]]]}' # or a zipped shapefile instead of geojson: curl -X POST https://portal.placealert.org/precise-api/api/euclidean/query \ -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY" \ -F "shapefile=@my_area.zip"
GET /precise-api/api/euclidean/admin?iso3=ZWE&level=2&name=Harare
Instant lookup of precomputed values for named admin units (levels 1–3, roughly country/province/district) — no computation, filter by country and/or name.
GET /precise-api/api/geo/countries
No API key required — lists the 57 supported countries, so you can confirm coverage before building a request.

Don't have a key yet? Request one:

All responses are JSON.

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Africa overview · H3 res 4
Highway dist
Major road dist

H3 cell
Analyze my area

Click the map to place points, then finish the shape. ~5 km² per hexagon, so keep it neighborhood/study-area scale.

Want to script this, or query bigger areas? See the API docs.

Road type

Display

km · red = close (high exposure) · green = far

Use as

Road lines


Admin boundaries

Filter by country
Africa
H3 cells
Median dist
75th pct
95th pct
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