Put Rural Tanzania on the Map
A spotlight on Crowd2Map Tanzania, a 2018 Global Sprint project
Janet Chapman (@jachapman82) is the Campaigns Manager at Tanzania Development Trust and founder of Crowd2Map Tanzania. She was selected to join the current round of Mozilla Open Leaders for her work on Crowd2Map Tanzania. Janet is passionate about social justice, digital inclusion and mapping, especially in Tanzania.
I interviewed Janet to learn more about Crowd2Map Tanzania and how you can help at Mozilla’s Global Sprint 2018.
What is Crowd2Map Tanzania?
Crowd2Map Tanzania is a crowdsourced mapping project aiming to put rural Tanzania on the map, particularly those areas where girls are at risk of Female Genitatl Mutilation (FGM). Since 2015, we have been adding schools, hospitals, roads, buildings and villages to OpenStreetMap (OSM), an open source map available to all, with the help of over 5500 volunteers worldwide and 600 on the ground in Tanzania. With minimal budget and no staff we have so far added over 2.1 million buildings and trained community mappers in 26 areas of Tanzania. We have also been featured on Al Jazeera, The Guardian HOT, and Missing Maps. Having better maps helps FGM activists like Rhobi Samwelly find the villages where girls are at risk of being cut as outlined in this short film.
The mapping is in two phases — firstly online volunteers trace roads and buildings from satellite images such as in these tasks then volunteers on the ground add names of villages, offices, churches, shops and other points of interest using a free smartphone app Maps.Me and printed fieldpapers which they email to a remote volunteer helper to input into OSM, and then produce printable maps of villages, wards etc. We also helped organise the first State of the Map Tanzania, a 3 day mapping training event in Dar es Salaam in December 2017, and a 3 day training event in Mwanza for Open Data Day in March 2018.
Many communities in rural Tanzania have various challenges: poverty, food shortages, and poor access to electricity and water, and gender inequality. Having local access to better maps can help overcome many of them and a solvable problem. There is a 2 min film here showing why:
Why did you start Crowd2Map Tanzania?
As a volunteer for Tanzania Development Trust (TDT) I spend a lot of time visiting projects in rural Tanzania. As they were not on any map they were often very difficult to find. This seemed like a ridiculous situation in the 21st Century, particularly to someone from London who is used to always having access to maps.
I love MozFest and go every year. At MozFest 2015 I got talking to Egle Ramanauskaite a citizen scientist from the Human Computation Institute. She told me about the camera traps she was setting up to find out where animals were. I said I wanted to find out where villages in Tanzania were. She didn’t believe that could still be an issue. I told her about Zeze, a village of 9200 people which did not appear on Google maps or even OpenStreetMap, and together we decided to start Crowd2Map. We came back to MozFest for the next years and ran workshops to further develop the project.
How did your project start addressing the problem of female genital mutilation (FGM) in the Serengeti region?
The largest project TDT has funded is an FGM Safe House in Mugumu, the capital of Serengeti district, run by Rhobi Samwelly, herself an FGM survivor. Her work was hampered by the lack of maps showing where the villages where girls are at risk. Often she would get a phone call saying there is a girl in xx village about to be cut, please rescue her. Without a map it would be very difficult to find, particularly in the dark. Now she can use a free phone app, Maps.Me that runs off the data we have added to OpenStreetMap.
What challenges have you faced working on this project?
We are all volunteers. At the start they only volunteers who could help on the ground in Tanzania were people with their own smartphone. In the areas we are working most people are living in extreme poverty, on less than a dollar a day, so did not have one. Getting microgrants from Humanitarian OpenStreetMap and NetHope enabled to get phones to volunteers in key areas of Tanzania. We are also using printed fieldpapers to add local knowledge to the map, however printing them is a challenge without a budget. Connectivity is an issue in many places. Maps.Me works offline but you do need a connection to upload the data. Access to power to charge phones is also challenging as the villages we are mapping are often way off grid, with limited access to solar power.
What kind of skills do I need to help you?
Any! An interest in mapping, Tanzania, development or womens’ rights helps! We always need help spreading the word, mapping, validating and inputting data. All you need is an internet connection and you can start mapping here right now!
And we are also looking for coders to help improve fieldpapers and to work out the best way to input machine learning data.
How can others join your project at #mozsprint 2018?
Please vist our repo here:
You can also visit our website, slack channel or just drop me a line… Janet j.chapman@tanzdevtrust.org
What meme or gif best represents your project?
Join us wherever you are May 10–11 at Mozilla’s Global Sprint to work on many amazing open projects! Join a diverse network of scientists, educators, artists, engineers and others in person and online to hack and build projects for a health Internet. Register today
