The West Africa Coastal Vulnerability Mapping: GPW Version 4 Population Growth, Preliminary Release 1, 2000-2010, represents positive or negative growth in the number of persons per grid cell, and was calculated by subtracting an unreleased working version of the Gridded Population of the World (GPW), Version 4, year 2000 population count raster for the West Africa region from an unreleased working version of the GPWv4 year 2010 population count raster and cropping the result to within 200 kilometers of the coast. GPW provides globally consistent and spatially explicit human population information and data for use in research, policy making, and communications. This is a gridded (raster) data product that renders global population data at the scale and extent needed to demonstrate the spatial relationship of human populations and the environment globally. The gridded data set is constructed from national or subnational input Units (usually administrative Units) of varying resolutions. The native grid cell resolution of GPWv4 is 30 arc-second, or ~1 km at the equator.