data.mwater.co

Openly licensed datasets maintained by mWater and published as versioned, downloadable files. Every release is immutable and self-describing: a manifest.json beside the files documents the schema, license, sizes and checksums. Machine readers start at catalog.json or llms.txt.

Administrative Regions CC BY 4.0

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Administrative boundaries for every country, from the country itself (level 0) down to level 5 where available, with a stable integer id per region and the full containment hierarchy on every row. Based on GADM 2.8 and continuously updated by mWater with national and partner boundary data. Two geometry variants: full resolution for spatial analysis, and simplified for drawing maps. All coordinates in EPSG:4326.

Download the whole dataset

No release published yet.

Download one country

One GeoPackage per country with two layers, admin_regions and admin_regions_simplified. Opens in QGIS, GDAL, geopandas, DuckDB and anything else that reads SQLite.

Quick start

# download Madagascar and list its districts
curl -O https://data.mwater.co/admin-regions/latest/countries/MDG.gpkg
ogrinfo -al -q MDG.gpkg admin_regions -where "level = 2" -fields=NO -geom=NO

# or read it in place, without downloading
ogrinfo -so /vsicurl/https://data.mwater.co/admin-regions/latest/countries/MDG.gpkg admin_regions
import geopandas as gpd
communes = gpd.read_file("MDG.gpkg", layer="admin_regions", where="level = 3")

The latest/ path above is a convenience that redirects to the current release. Pin a release for reproducible work: read latest.json once and keep the versioned URL it gives you.

Columns

ColumnTypeDescription

License and provenance

Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. Please attribute "mWater Administrative Regions (data.mwater.co), derived from GADM 2.8 with national and partner updates".

    For scripts and agents

    • /catalog.json lists every dataset with its latest.json pointer and manifest URL pattern.
    • /llms.txt is a plain-text guide to this site written for language-model tools.
    • Each dataset has a latest.json naming the current version, and each release has a manifest.json with schema, file list, sizes, SHA-256 checksums and per-country bounding boxes.
    • Release files are immutable and served with long cache lifetimes and open CORS, so they can be fetched from browsers and range-read by GDAL.