The Governorate-level administrative boundary file for Iraq. Governorate shapefiles are dissolved from the district boundary shape file. Users should note that many publicly available shapefiles for Iraq do not deal appropriately with the boundaries of Baghdad Governorate, which changed substantially under the Coalition Provisional Authority. As a general point, analysts using time-series data on governorate- or district-level covariates for Iraq should be aware that the physical areas covered by named areas - Erbil district, for example - change substantially over time. Additional Information: Our boundary files are designed to conform, as closely as possible, to the boundaries of districts and governorates recognized and observed in the household surveys administered by the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) in the second half of 2003 and published in Baseline Food Security Analysis in Iraq (WFP, 2004). This conformance is critical for weighting measures of violence, reconstruction spending, and community characteristics by district or governorate population. The 2003 WFP survey provides ante-bellum district-level population statistics by extrapolating known growth rates from the 1997 Iraqi census.