In the present study employing recent epidemiological data, very high prevalences of P. falciparum (> 70 %) were found in the entire north and the south-west (Taï forest region) of Côte d’Ivoire. This is in contrast with lower prevalences obtained from a previous spatial analysis using historical data focussing on children aged < 16 years [22]. Recent environmental transformations, such as rice farming in the north [44] and progression of deforestation in the Taï forest in the south-west, led to increased population densities [45, 46], which might explain the change in P. falciparum prevalence rates in these areas. However, differences in survey designs and large heterogeneities of historical data must be considered to deepen the understanding of potential changes in P. falciparum prevalence and parasitaemia in space and time [47]. The design of the present study allowed us to have more uniformly distributed data across the country than before, and hence, prediction uncertainty was minimized.