Context

Why many villages have no postal codes

Postal codes assume formal street layouts and registered addressing systems. Many rural communities and informal settlements don’t have those — and that makes them easy to miss in global datasets.

How villages are identified

In many places, villages are known through community naming, oral history, and local landmarks — not house numbers.

  • Local and clan-based names
  • Proximity to rivers, markets, or schools
  • Administrative context (county, payam, boma)
  • Seasonal settlement patterns

What goes wrong in mapping systems

When location data is incomplete, tools may misplace villages or merge multiple names into one point.

  • Misspellings and aliases are treated as different places
  • Search results drift into another country
  • Village centroids are missing or outdated
  • Boundaries are inconsistent across datasets

Why this matters

When villages are missing from maps, services and resources become harder to plan and deliver — and communities stay digitally invisible.

Humanitarian response

Faster needs assessment, distribution planning, and transparent reporting.

Health & education

Facility mapping, survey coverage, and better program targeting.

Civic monitoring

Election observation, incident reporting, and public accountability tools.

EasyGeocoder’s approach

  • Region bias: tuned for South Sudan and East Africa to reduce “drift.”
  • Context-aware queries: supports county/state fields for better matching.
  • Transparent sources: shows source and metadata for every result.
  • Community verification: designed for corrections and adding missing villages.