https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/09/facebooks-ai-team-maps-out-where-everyone-in-africa-lives/

A new map of nearly all of Africa shows exactly where the continent’s 1.3 billion people live down to the meter, which could help everyone from local governments to aid organizations. The map joins others like it from Facebook created by running satellite imagery through a machine learning model.

It’s not exactly that there was some mystery about where people live, but the degree of precision matters. You may know that a million people live in a given region, and that about half are in the bigger city and another quarter in assorted towns. But that leaves hundreds of thousands only accounted for in the vaguest way.