How to read Kenya in GospelGraph
A first-pass pastoral field map, not a false-precision census product.
Kenya GospelGraph is built to help pastors and planters compare wards honestly. The goal is not to flood you with categories. The goal is to help you ask: Where is the burden high? Where is witness thin? Where can repeated presence be sustained? And where does the field seem to be opening or hardening?
Start with four pastoral questions
The Kenya explorer is best read as a field-triage tool. It is trying to help you see where ministry burden is concentrated, where public witness looks thin, where repeated presence is more workable, and where the field appears to be opening or hardening over time.
That means the layers should be read as ministry posture, not as final judgments about neighborhoods, conversions, or the faithfulness of local churches. The map sorts the field so pastors can ask better questions on the ground.
- Ministry Pressure asks where need, witness thinness, and ministry viability are converging most strongly right now.
- Witness Thinness asks where Gospel presence appears sparse or structurally light.
- Ground for Presence asks whether repeated, embodied ministry looks workable in the actual built environment.
- Movement of the Field asks whether a ward looks more open, more settled, or more resistant across comparable time windows.
- Pastoral Priority combines burden, thin witness, and workable presence into a first-look triage read.
Why the app shows source confidence instead of hiding it
Kenya v1 uses reachable KNBS/rKenyaCensus 2019 tables projected onto wards. When a ward cleanly joins to a sub-county label, GospelGraph marks that as a cleaner local read. When it does not, GospelGraph falls back to county-level values rather than pretending to know more than it does.
That is deliberate. False precision is worse than honest fallback. The product is built to show where the read is firmer and where it should be treated more cautiously.
- Sub-county exact means the ward joined cleanly to a more local census table.
- County fallback means GospelGraph refused a fuzzy join and used broader values instead.
- Religion is still county-only in the current Kenya build.
- A narrow alias layer fixes only obvious spelling variants, not speculative geography.
What the witness and presence layers are actually measuring
Church, market, transport, building, and night-light signals are not trying to tell you whether a place is spiritually alive. They are trying to tell you what kind of ground the place is for ministry presence: sparse or dense, reachable or difficult, publicly active or thinly formed.
That makes them useful for pastoral comparison, but they still need local verification. A strong signal on the map is not a substitute for local leaders, field visits, or denominational knowledge.
- OpenStreetMap church counts are public-map infrastructure signals, not a verified evangelical church census.
- Road-aware church-access time is a proxy for repeated presence, not a full transportation or safety model.
- Open Buildings and VIIRS-like night lights help describe built intensity and settlement form, not holiness, prosperity, or safety.
How the Kenya movement read is built
Kenya movement is an honest comparable-history layer, not a claim that every ward feature has been fully rebuilt across time. The historical backbone is anchored mainly through comparable VIIRS-like night-lights snapshots while the non-temporal ward inputs are held fixed for honesty.
That gives GospelGraph two useful windows. The recent frame gives a cleaner modern comparison. The long frame gives a deeper memory read. Confidence is shown separately so a dramatic swing is not confused with a well-supported swing.
- Recent movement compares 2019 to 2024, with a 2021 midpoint helping the trajectory read.
- Long movement compares the 2005 backcast anchor to 2024.
- Negative comparable shift is read as opening; positive comparable shift is read as hardening.
- Confidence reflects history depth, source support, and trajectory stability.
What stays contextual rather than being forced into the ward score
Joshua Project and ACLED matter, but they are not treated as if they were clean ward-native facts. Joshua Project is used as contextual people-group geography. ACLED is shown as national pressure backdrop because the public HDX files in this build are not authenticated ward-level event points.
That means the Kenya surface keeps these layers visible without pretending they are more precise than they are.
- Joshua Project is contextual overlay, not ward-native ethnicity.
- ACLED is national context, not ward-level scoring, in the current public-data build.
- These layers should sharpen pastoral awareness, not masquerade as exact local measurement.