1. Context: why address a country?
Addressing a territory means giving it a common language. Before a postman can deliver a parcel, an ambulance locate a patient, or an investor evaluate a neighbourhood, every building, every plot, every entrance must have a unique, stable and shared identifier. This is what is called an address reference system.
For context, addressing in France dates back to 1805, under Napoleon I, with the creation of the first street numbers in Paris and the numbering of dwellings to facilitate property tax collection. In the United States, the metric numbering system was popularised in the 19th century to support rapid urban growth. In Japan, addressing is based on a block-and-district system, reflecting a very different urban organisation.
In Côte d'Ivoire, as in most rapidly developing countries, urban growth has long outpaced registration capacity. The metropolis of Abidjan, with its more than 6 million inhabitants, was built on informal structures where the concept of an address was virtually nonexistent for the majority of households. Deliveries relied on verbal descriptions, public services on neighbourhood knowledge, and emergencies on rough approximations.
It is in this context that the Abidjan District Addressing Project (PADA) was born, led by the Ministry of Construction, Housing and Urban Planning. ING FI heads the consortium responsible for its implementation. Since its launch, 243 943 addresses and 13,755 streets have been digitised, primarily across Greater Abidjan, with Street View photographic coverage of 304,378 points.
The figures cited in this article come from the collection and analysis work carried out by AltiaGeo-Group within the framework of the National Territorial Observatory.
2. The system adopted by Côte d'Ivoire
Côte d'Ivoire opted for a metric addressing system, also known as a metric numbering system or metric coordinate system. This choice, inspired by international best practices and adapted to African realities, rests on several founding principles.
Metric numbering principle
In this system, each address number corresponds to the distance in metres between the entrance of the building and the origin of the street to which it belongs. Thus, an address bearing the number 450 is located approximately 450 metres from the starting point of the street. Even numbers are assigned to one side of the street, odd numbers to the other.
An address number in the metric system is not a simple sequential counter: it is encoded geographic information. It indicates both the position on the street and the distance from the origin point. — Principe de base du système métrique d'adressage, BNETD/CIGN
Structure of an Ivorian address
A complete address in the PADA system consists of four main elements:
Metric number + Street type + Street name + Municipality
Example: 1245, Rue des Jardins, Cocody, Abidjan
The number 1245 indicates that the entrance is 1,245 metres from the street's origin point.
Unique identifiers and traceability
Each street and each address is assigned a unique identifier (of the type ABJ-COC-XXXXXX for Cocody streets, Abidjan), enabling a stable link with institutional databases and incremental updates without collision risk. This architecture is complemented by official OCHA codes at commune, department and region level, enabling interoperability with international humanitarian data systems.
3. Advantages of the Ivorian system
Adapted to rapidly expanding cities
The great advantage of the metric number in a context of unplanned urban growth is its ability to accommodate new buildings without renumbering existing addresses. Where a sequential system (1, 2, 3…) becomes blocked as soon as a new construction is inserted between two already-numbered buildings, the metric system simply assigns the number corresponding to the real distance, which is fixed over time.
Built-in geographic logic
Unlike inherited or sequential numbering, the metric number carries within it implicit location information. A delivery driver or first responder who knows the origin and direction of a street can estimate the position of an address without a map, simply by knowing the distance. This is a genuine operational advantage in areas with low mapping coverage.
🔗 Interoperability with GIS systems
Because each number encodes a relative position on a geolocated street, interpolation geocoding is natively consistent with the system. A GIS capable of reading the geometry of a street and the address number can calculate the approximate position of a building without additional GPS data. This method would be applied, for example, in the geocoding of the 150,000 missing addresses in Cocody, Yopougon and Attécoubé.
🏛️ Solid institutional framework
The system has a strong government anchor through PADA and BNETD/CIGN, an accessible national platform (adressage.gouv.ci), and published technical documentation. This gives it a legitimacy and durability that informal or community-based systems cannot offer.
4. Persistent limitations and challenges
⚠️ Incomplete coverage: the challenge of 150,000 addresses
The reality of available data reveals a deep geographic fracture within Greater Abidjan itself. While communes such as Marcory or Koumassi show 100% field GPS coverage, Cocody (82,651 addresses), Yopougon (59,611 addresses) and Attécoubé (6,037 addresses) together account for more than 150,000 addresses with no GPS coordinates — representing 61.6% of the total ungeocoded.
An address without GPS cannot be navigated by a mobile app, cannot be optimised in a delivery route plan, and cannot be used to calculate a catchment area or analyse population density. The number exists — the point on the map does not.
🧱 Uneven GPS precision quality
For addresses that were actually geocoded by field GPS, precision varies widely between communes. The median distance between a GPS address and its street alignment is 94 m in Abobo, but reaches 2,001 m in Attécoubé — far exceeding the threshold of usefulness for delivery or navigation. These discrepancies reveal positioning problems during data collection or imprecise street alignments.
📛 Street names: standardisation still in progress
Of the 13,755 geolocated streets, a significant proportion have no stable official name. Streets are referenced by technical identifier (e.g. ABJ-COC-00452) without a name accessible to the general public. The database records 11,121 street names from a cache, but consistency between names used in the field, in administrative documents and in commercial GPS systems remains partial.
Areas not yet addressed or in the process of deployment?
Songon, Anyama and Port-Bouet, three communes of the Abidjan conurbation, have no addresses yet in the PADA system at the time of writing. Nationally, across 524 communes and sub-prefectures, the vast majority of the territory remains to be addressed. The extension beyond Abidjan (Bouaké, Daloa, Korhogo, Yamoussoukro under the PAVI framework) is underway.
Limited public adoption and use
Having an operational addressing system is not enough: residents must also use it. Furthermore, local authorities would need to have governance over address data for local adoption and effective use in municipal development projects. Yet, the social appropriation of the address remains a major challenge in Côte d'Ivoire, as in many African countries. Informal landmarks (proximity to a market, a church, a petrol station) remain dominant in everyday communication, and administrative forms do not systematically request the PADA address.
4 bis. An honest assessment: could a hybrid system have worked better?
Intellectual honesty compels us to say it: the uniform metric system, as deployed, may not have been the only possible response. Côte d'Ivoire could have considered a hybrid approach, combining two logics according to neighbourhood morphology.
In neighbourhoods with sparse housing, low-density urban fabric or rural areas still being structured, the metric system retains all its value: it adapts to unplanned growth, requires no prior plot plan and tolerates future changes without renumbering.
On the other hand, in fully built-up neighbourhoods with established plot plans — where parcels are registered in the land registry, streets have been laid out for decades, and where homes are often already numbered by residents or developers — a sequential system could have proved simpler to adopt socially and less costly to deploy operationally. The number is already there, embedded in local usage; making it coexist with a new metric system sometimes creates unnecessary friction.
This observation does not diminish the qualitative and technical value of the adopted system, nor the remarkable work of PADA and BNETD/CIGN. It simply invites documentation of the trade-offs so that future extensions — particularly across the 510 communes still unaddressed — can benefit from the lessons learned on the ground.
From raw data to street sign: we cover the entire chain
AltiaGeo-Group is not only an analytics player. Our positioning covers the entire lifecycle of address data — from field collection through to long-term maintenance.
Whether you start from a completely blank municipality or an existing database to consolidate like those of Greater Abidjan, we intervene at the right level of the chain — or across all of it. The National Territorial Observatory we operate is precisely the tool that ensures this coherence at national scale.
Discuss your project →5. A world tour of other systems
Il n'existe pas un seul modèle d'adressage. Les pays ont développé des approches très différentes selon leur histoire, leur géographie et leurs contraintes administratives. En voici les principales familles, avec leurs forces et leurs limites.
The number is assigned sequentially by street, even numbers on one side, odd on the other. The origin is fixed by convention (often the town centre or the Seine in Paris). This is the model inherited by many former French colonies.
Ideal use context: cities with a stable and relatively dense layout, where new parcels are rare. In rural or rapidly expanding areas, it generates "bis" entries (12 bis, 12 ter) that complicate geocoding.
Grid cities assign address numbers by block: the number 1234 indicates the 12th block from the centre, at the 34th position. This system is intuitive in planned cities but inapplicable in organic or hilly geographies.
Ideal use context: planned urbanism on flat terrain, cities founded ex nihilo (Las Vegas, Phoenix). Ineffective in dense historic cities or African urban morphologies.
The United Kingdom uses a very precise hierarchical postcode (SW1A 2AA) that can locate a building to within a few dozen metres, coupled with a sequential street number. Managed by Royal Mail, it is one of the most precise address reference systems in the world.
Ideal use context: countries with a strong universal postal service and developed land registry. Highly useful for e-commerce logistics and healthcare services.
Japan numbers buildings in order of construction within a block (chōme), not by position on the street. An address indicates: prefecture → city → ward → neighbourhood → block → building number. The streets themselves often have no name.
Ideal use context: system suited to cities with high plot density and a precise cadastral tradition. Confusing to non-Japanese visitors — GPS devices are indispensable.
what3words divides the planet into 3 × 3 metre squares, each associated with a combination of three words (///river.sun.market). Without infrastructure or prior official address, it allows any point on the globe to be located with 3 m precision by sharing 3 words.
Ideal use context: unaddressed rural areas, medical emergencies, last-mile deliveries in informal settings, humanitarian operations. Used by emergency services in Mongolia, Sierra Leone and Nigeria. Limitation: dependence on a private company and internet connectivity.
Developed by Google and published as open source, the Plus Code encodes geographic coordinates into a short alphanumeric code (7FG8+QM Abidjan). Adjustable precision from 14 m to < 1 m depending on code length. Natively integrated into Google Maps since 2018.
Ideal use context: complement to official addresses in uncovered areas, development projects, humanitarian aid. Advantage over what3words: entirely free and decodable offline.
Projected coordinate systems (UTM, MGRS) encode any geographic point in metres from a projection origin. Centimetre precision is possible. Used in the military, land registry and professional GIS, but entirely inaccessible to the general public.
Ideal use context: land use planning, civil engineering, surveying, defence. Not designed for postal addressing or civilian delivery.
6. Comparative summary table
| System | Precision | Urban expansion | Without infrastructure | Public navigation | Deployment cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 🇨🇮 Métrique CI (PADA) | ~1–5 m (field GPS) | ✓ Well suited | ✗ Streets required | ✓ Good | ⚠ High |
| 🇫🇷 Séquentiel français | ~10–30 m | ✗ Re-numbering | ✗ Map required | ✓ Very good | ⚠ Medium |
| 🇺🇸 Grille américaine | ~10–50 m | ✓ Good (damier) | ✗ Map required | ✓ Excellent (grid) | ⚠ Medium |
| 🇬🇧 Postal zonal UK | ~5–20 m | ✓ Good | ✗ Postal operator | ✓ Very good | ✗ Very high |
| 🇯🇵 Parcelle japonaise | < 1 m | ✓ Excellent | ✗ Cadastre required | ✗ Difficult | ✗ Very high |
| 🔤 what3words | 3 m partout | ✓ Instant | ✓ Yes | ✓ Good (app) | ✓ Low |
| ➕ Plus Codes (Google) | 3–14 m | ✓ Instant | ✓ Yes (open source) | ⚠ Partial | ✓ Very low |
| UTM / MGRS | < 0,1 m | ✓ Total | ✓ Yes | ✗ None | ✓ Low |
7. Perspectives and recommendations
The metric system adopted by Côte d'Ivoire is solid in its foundations. Its geographic logic, institutional anchoring and native compatibility with modern GIS tools make it a coherent choice for a rapidly developing country. But the available data also shows that deployment remains incomplete and that the practical utility of the system depends directly on the quality and completeness of GPS data.
Combining official addressing with complementary location systems
For rural or not-yet-addressed areas — which represent almost all of the territory outside Abidjan — solutions such as Plus Codes can offer immediate location without prior infrastructure. A hybrid strategy, integrating PADA addresses where they exist and Plus Codes for the rest, would allow a useful national coverage from today.
Completing the geocoding of 150,000 missing addresses
This is technical priority number one. Interpolation geocoding on geolocated streets, with differentiation according to the numeric gap (distance interpolation or random positioning), would raise Abidjan's GPS coverage rate from 38% to over 96% — a decisive step towards the commercial and institutional operationalisation of the system.
Investing in social adoption
Technology alone does not solve the problem of usage. Municipalities, delivery operators, insurance companies and healthcare facilities are key drivers for gradually establishing the PADA address as a standard in administrative and commercial exchanges. Without use, an addressing system remains inert infrastructure.
Côte d'Ivoire made the right system choice. The challenge is no longer one of design — it is one of execution: completing GPS coverage, ensuring data quality, and creating the conditions for adoption by economic and institutional actors. This is precisely the mission pursued by AltiaGeo-Group's National Territorial Observatory.