Settlements of Afghanistan were digitized by the United State Agency for International Development (USAID) using United States Defense Mapping Agency (USDMA; 1967-1988) at scale of 1:100,000, using Atlas GIS software. There are about 31230 settlements (villages) in the layer and this number may increase because various UN agencies and Afghan Government have different number of settlements that varies from 30,000 to 45,000. In addition, The majority of the geographic locations of these villages are not in correct location due to the fact that villages moved or abandoned because of the war, tribunal disputes and drought. In addition, the village were digitized incorrectly because lack of Cartographic experience. Afghanistan Information Management Service (AIMS) is in the process of correcting the geographic location of villages by comparing the villages to the Russian 1:50,000 scale topos. In addition, the AIMS office has verified many of these settlements when certain Non Governmental Organizations (NGO) brought Global Positioning System (GPS) settlement points to AIMS office. These settlement have geocodes and these geocodes will change when AIMS adopts the new provincial and district administrative boundaries. This dataset is intended for researchers, students, and policy makers for reference and mapping purposes, and may be used for basic applications such as viewing, querying, and map output production, or to provide a basemap to support graphical overlays and analysis with other spatial data. Afghanistan Information Management Service (2005). Settlements of Afghanistan, 1997-2004. Afghanistan Information Management Service. Available at: http://purl.stanford.edu/cb842bc5357
