Muslim Population & Community Insight Dashboard

The Islamic Foundation — a charity based in Markfield, Leicestershire — wanted a clearer picture of where Muslim communities and families actually live, both nationally and in its own local area. The underlying question was practical: where are communities concentrated enough to need facilities like a mosque, and where are families the charity could reach out to for support — rather than working from assumption or anecdote.

Built end-to-end, independently — data collection, processing pipeline, and the dashboard itself, from ONS Census 2021 and Nomis data through to a deployed, self-service tool the charity can explore on its own.

• National: 318 local authorities and 7,264 neighbourhood-level areas (MSOAs) across England & Wales
• Local drill-down: North West Leicestershire, with a dedicated view for Coalville and Markfield
• Datasets: Census 2021 religion, ethnicity, age structure, occupation/NS-SeC, household deprivation, plus IMD deprivation scores and accommodation type

Census and Nomis data were fetched, merged into local-authority and neighbourhood-level tables, and turned into a two-tier Streamlit dashboard: a National Explorer for comparing areas across England & Wales, and a Local Area Explorer drilling into Coalville and Markfield specifically — religion, ethnicity, age, deprivation and household composition, all in one place instead of scattered across separate ONS/Nomis downloads.

Dashboard built and deployed, giving the charity self-service access to explore the data themselves rather than requesting a bespoke analysis every time a question comes up. It also surfaced a genuine surprise: Muslim families and communities turned out to be concentrated in a different part of the area than the charity had assumed going in.

No formal recommendation has been made from it yet — the tool is meant as an ongoing resource for the charity to keep exploring, not a one-off report.