Global national and sub-national administrative units from the FAO (2024).
"The administrative boundaries dataset at level 2 (Sub-national level) is part of the Global Administrative Unit Layers (GAUL) dataset series which includes information on administrative units for all the countries in the world, providing a contribution to the standardization of the spatial dataset representing administrative units." (FAO)
For more information about the conversion or maintenance of this dataset, please contact nlebovits@pm.me.
The data were created on 2024-12-19. Data were converted to Parquet files and uploaded to Source.Coop on 2025-10-24.
Per FAO:
The overall GAUL methodology consists in a) collecting the best available data from most reliable sources, b) assemble national datasets into a common dataset by matching international boundaries with a reference authoritative dataset, i.e. the UN 2018, c) standardizing attributes to a common table of attributes, d) generating codes using GAUL Coding System, e) applying a topology and f) fill the metadata for each country.
The administrative boundaries at the level 2 dataset distinguishes Districts and equivalent. The GAUL maintains global layers with a unified coding system at country, first (e.g. departments), and second administrative levels (e.g. districts). The complete metadata reference for each country, along with the specific license or Terms of Use applicable at the country level, can be accessed here.
The data are provided in parquet files partitioned by country, corresponding to the ISO codes. The original data were provided as a Shapefile.
Each row in the dataset represents a second-level administrative unit (district or equivalent) with the following columns:
iso3_code (STRING): ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 country code, e.g., TZA for Tanzaniamap_code (STRING): Map code identifiergaul0_code (INT64): GAUL country-level codegaul0_name (STRING): Country namegaul1_code (INT64): GAUL first-level administrative unit code (e.g., province/state)gaul1_name (STRING): First-level administrative unit namegaul2_code (INT64): GAUL second-level administrative unit code (district)gaul2_name (STRING): Second-level administrative unit namecontinent (STRING): Continent namedisp_en (STRING): Display name in Englishgeometry (BINARY): Polygon geometry encoded as WKBgeometry_bbox (STRUCT): Bounding box struct (xmin, ymin, xmax, ymax) for efficient spatial queriesCurrent version: 1.0
Version 1.0 (2025-10-24):
FAO. 2024. Global Administrative Unit Layers (GAUL). [Accessed on [DD Month YYYY]]. https://data.apps.fao.org/?lang=en. Licence: CC-BY-4.0
This work is made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0).
IMPORTANT – Read carefully the Terms of Use before using the digital data. By downloading the Global Administrative Unit Layers (GAUL) 2024 you agree to be bound by the terms and conditions contained in this document.