How does an NGO best allocate limited vaccines in the Democratic Republic of the Congo? What is the best way to distribute aid at the local level after a natural disaster? Subnational administrative boundaries are essential to answering these questions. While geospatial data acts as the backbone of various disciplines and fields of research, there have been few groups that seek to compile and clean global subnational boundaries for free and open use.

The geoBoundaries team currently tracks and updates the boundaries of 199 total entities, including all 195 United Nations member states, Greenland, Taiwan, San Marino, and Kosovo. Check our our website at https://www.geoboundaries.org/

Our team is looking for high school or college students to join our summer team in conducting international research on developing nations in Africa, Asia, and South America. The program will be 6 - 8 weeks long depending on your schedule and a minimum commitment of 5 hours a week. You will be have weekly meetings, an end write-up, and present your research to the whole team to receive feedback. Acknowledgments will be given if work is used.

The project will be with comprehensive reviews of each country in each area. These reviews will consist of: an overview of the administrative units in each country, the names of such units; the number of each unit (if available); and a brief historical background of why such subnational units exist as they do (i.e. what document shows that Libya changed their administrative units or when was the last territory of the USA added.).

Please fill out the form below if interested:

Direct questions to jbpanganiban@email.wm.edu.

Learn more about our research lab here: https://www.wm.edu/as/data-science/researchlabs/geolab/index.php