Map the Philippines Launches
How do we quickly make sense of data when our communities are in crisis?
In 2009, Typhoon Ondoy (Ketsana) brought in local crowd-sourced disaster response tracking and monitoring crudely through public online spreadsheets. Rescue Hub was the first initiative the organized information about the typhoon, with hundreds of anonymous volunteers collaborated in the days after Ondoy, one of the worst natural disasters to hit the country in terms of number of people affected.
Seven years later, Map the Philippines, one of the initiatives of the HIFI Tech Hub, launches in Bayanihan Centre last September 9, 2016 at Unilab’s Bayanihan Center in Pasig. Celina Agaton, Founder and Managing Director, introduced Map the Philippines as tracking platform for public and private programs and services, layered against resilience data and real-time community needs to help achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
Guest speakers Dr. Mahar Lagmay of DOST’s Project NOAH shared their experience mapping the country since Typhoon Haiyan and the importance of mapping your community for disaster risk reduction. Anika Dauden of BPI Foundation shared about their three focus areas for greatest CSR impact: promotion of financial inclusion and economic empowerment through education and entrpreneurship, and advancing envronmental sustainability.
About Map the Philippines
Map the Philippines is an international initiative to help provide free, comprehensive and accessible maps of the Philippines. We teach local government, business, NGOs, students and citizens how to map their community assets and visualize needed infrastructure and investment for economic and tourist development, and disaster and community resilience. We collect and share data to help meet the Sustainable Development Goals through real-time data collection, coordination and monitoring of cross sector efforts. Our mapping partners include the U.S. State Department’s MapGive program, OpenStreetMap, Humanitarian OpenStreetMap, OpenStreetMap Philippines and the Digital Humanitarian Network.
Our goal is to help create more sustainable infrastructure and to provide a space for better cross sector collaboration, transparency and accountability for our communities. Our free online platform launches in early 2016 and provides opportunities for citizens and organizations to share their programs, services, and best practices, and to identify funding needs and connect with other stakeholders.
Map the Philippines’ partners include Making All Voices Count, a consortium of the U.K Department for International Development (DFID), U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, Open Society Foundations (OSF) and Omidyar Network (ON), Hivos, the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) and Ushahidi.
