Crowdsourced Mapping to Prevent FGM in Tanzania

After being invited to participate in the first State of the Map Africa conference in Kampala in July, we are delighted we are now organising the first State of the Map Tanzania conference in Dar es Salaam in December.

This will bring together around 100 mappers from all over Tanzania for a 3 day training event with the aim of sharing good practice and developing mapping skills so that together we can get all of rural Tanzania on the map.

Thanks to sponorship from YouthMappers we will also be able to bring students from 5 other East African countries to the event to share their knowledge and forge greater links within the community.  There will be speakers and training sessions by Humanitarian OpenStreetMap, Ramani Huria who have mapped Dar es Salaam to help increase flood resilience, FGM activists and people involved in mapping to help in the fight against malaria and HIV.  There is more information here and we hope to record all the speeches so that people who cannot attend in person can also learn from them.

The community mapping is going extremely well.  We have now mapped almost 2 million buildings and involved over 3500 online mappers and 600 field mappers in Tanzania, all volunteers.  We have just recruited mappers in 5 new areas of Tanzania.  

But travelling in rural Tanzania to map is not easy, particularly for women.  They have to travel on the back of motorbikes on very bumpy dirt roads, and often face harrassment and threats from local men.  But they continue to do this because they believe it is important to stand up for their rights, fight against FGM and gender based violence and help develop their communities by putting them on the map.  Rhobi, the founder of the FGM Safe House in Mugumu was due to talk about empowering female mappers at the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap annual conference in Canada in September.  Unfortunately her visa was refused so I gave the talk on her behalf.  

We have now mapped around 6% of rural Tanzania.  We are currently mapping here so if you have a spare half hour please help out!  We are also having an online mapathon as part of Geo week here, and holding a mapathon at Imperial College London on 21st London, to which you are cordially invited!

Many thanks for your generosity in helping us map rural Tanzania to help prevent FGM and improve development!

We were delighted to be awarded a HOT Microgrant this year to train community mappers in 4 areas of Tanzania, and presented thiscommunity webinar on the topic. Our project began in June. At the end of June I landed in Dar es Salaam, picked up some phones and set off for Mugumu for our first community mapping training. Setting up the phones with Maps.Me was a challenge, particularly due to power cuts and intermittent connectivity, but I had a lot of help from the staff and girls at the FGM Safe House. None of the community mappers we trained had used maps before, and most had never used a smartphone.  But they picked up the idea very quickly and loved using Maps.Me to show them directions to places they knew.  Everyone agreed that adding village names and other points of interest would be very useful in the fight against FGM and in helping development and navigation generally in the region.

My next stop was Maswa where we trained legal officers. Ezekiel from Kasodefo gave a very good explanation of why mapping is important for rural development and there were many astute comments and questions. They were very keen to map their villages put also wanted to collect data about children who were out of school, particularly those with disabilities, and on cases of Gender Based Violence, which is a large part of their caseload.  Therefore we also set up relevant forms in KoboCollect for them.  

In Mwanza I met Benedicto from Mboni ya Vijana and we went to the Institute of Rural Development Planning of which he is an alumni.  When they asked me to “speak to some students”  I wasn’t expecting to be shown to a room with over 350 attendees waiting patiently.  Showing them OpenStreetMap, Maps.Me and KoboCollect on 1 laptop and 30 phones all running off my phone’s hotspot was quite difficult, but there was huge interest and over 50 students signed up to come to a further meeting the next day, in which we set up a Youth Mappers Chapter.  

From there I went on to Bukoba were we had another mapping training and introduced the regional maps and planning department to OSM, then onto the wonderful State of the Map Africa that I have written about here. Finally after a mammoth bus journey on very bad roads I reached Zeze and the last mapping training.  Zeze is a village of 8,200 people 40 km off grid electricity, and still not on Google maps as you can see here. The community mappers had never used smartphones before and were fascinated to see satellite images of the village on OpenStreetMap. The Village Chairman is eagerly anticipating displaying the village map we are producing. The village is keen for residents to be able to obtain land certificates and we are working with Cadasta on this.

Finally I had one day in Dar es Salaam where I bumped into the legendary Ivan Gayton at dLab before going to Peace Corps, VSO and YALI, all of whom are keen to get involved.

Thank you to everyone who is helping us map rural Tanzania.  We are currently mapping here and if you would like to join our Slack Channel you can do so here.

On Sunday we are hoping to have the biggest mapathon ever - if you are interested in getting involved you can do so here .

Links:

• First State of the Map in Africa
• Hopefully biggest mapathon event