Republic of Liberia: Planning and Development Atlas

The 1983 Planning and Development Atlas – a forgotten document?

Fred P.M. van der Kraaij · 2014

Published in 1983 by Liberia’s Ministry of Planning and Economic Affairs in cooperation with GTZ, the Planning and Development Atlas compiles 37 maps, 45 pages of text, 68 figures, and 104 tables on population, resources, and infrastructure, chiefly using the 1962 and 1974 censuses. The author argues that it may be a largely forgotten and possibly unavailable source in Liberia, where civil war destroyed much historical demographic and socioeconomic data and the 1984 census report was never published in full. A map of mineral resources and concessions documents offshore petroleum exploration rights granted decades before Liberia’s 2011 Chevron agreement, illustrating the atlas’s value for historical economic research and informed policymaking.