Crowdsourced Mapping to Prevent FGM in Tanzania

The second state of the map Tanzania conference, which we helped organise took part in January and was a great success. Over 130 people from east Africa and beyond attended all driven by a common goal: using and contributing to OpenStreetMap (OSM), the free editable map of the world; with the theme “Supporting Progress Towards the SDGs with Open Mapping.”

There were 4 days of talks, workshops, advanced GIS training, and of course a lot of networking. Herry and I talked about seven years of mapping against FGM. You can see our slides here.  Alpha from Ikondo school talked about mapping school journeys to better demonstrate the need for hostels and to fairly allocate places in them. His slides are here. 

Many of the Youthmapper groups we work with also spoke about their work, as did Thadei from the fantastic Plant Village Nuru project we work with in Kigoma which uses AI to detect crop diseases and increase yields. His slides are here.

There is a great video about the conference here in which we feature here

We are continuing to map and in January 135 mappers added 30,400 buildings and 1,300km of roads.  

On Feb 6th, zero tolerance for FGM day, we held a webinar, recording here. 

We continue to hold weekily training sessions and monthly sessions to share good practice within the Tanzanian open mapping community.  The recordings are on our YouTube channel here. 

We are currently mapping here and anyone with an internet connection can get involved.

Thank you again for your support!

Janet 

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Last year we hosted our first cohort of interns recruited as part of the Youthmappers Everywhere She Maps initiative which was a great success. You can read quotes from some of the participants here.  Building on that we were delighted to recruit 12 more Youthmapper interns for our second cohort.who started at the beginning of October. They come from 6 different African countries and we organise training via Zoom and WhatsApp delivered by their mentor GIS specialist Herry Kassunga and variious outside experts. They also participate in training delivered as part of the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Data Interns program.

We are continuing with our monthly mapping groups training, and have set up a new group in Shinyanga.  We are also mapping school journeys with Ikondo School in Kagera, who have particularly dangerous routes during the rainy season as you can see in this photo.  

We are also now mapping in Singida in the area around the village development project we are about to start in partnership with EuCanAid. This will bring access to water, a clinic, and improvements to the primary school in Mduguyu village. This area was very poorly mapped so we set up this project and have been training field mappers to add their local knowledge.  We will then produce village and district level maps for the community. 

We are also continuing to map areas where girls are at risk of FGM, particularly in the lead up to the cutting season expected in December. 

Finally we are busy helping organise the second State of the Map Tanzania conference. This will be a hybrid conference so we hope many of you will be able to join from wherever in the world you are - we already have a brilliant range of speakers confirmed, and the call for talks is still open. 

Thank you again for your generosity which enables this entirely volunteer run project to keep going.

Janet 

Mapping rural Tanzania is a huge job so we place great importance in building partnerships with anyone sharing our aims.  One partnership we are particularly proud of is with Youthmappers.

Youthmappers is a global network of student run mapping groups that now has over 200 chapters, 16 of which are in Tanzania, many of which we helped to establish. They organise mapping activities as part of their field work, their studies, for interest and for fun. 

Many of the Youthmapper groups are in quite rural areas and their colleges do not have very good access to technology or a history of teaching about geospatial technology.  Therefore we are working hard to develop links between the different groups so that less well established groups can learn from those with more experience. 

To this end we have set up monthly mapathons via zoom.  Each month a different groups presents their work.  Last month we heard from Sokoine University in Morogoro about they are working with the local council to help them improve flood resilience.  You can see the slides here, and see recordings for all of our trainings on our YouTube channel here.  

And if you'd like to know more please join us for the next event here.

Thank you again for your generosity!

Janet 

This week we celebrated International Women's Day with an event outlining why mapping is particularly important for women in rural Tanzania. Janet outlined how maps are helping protect girls from Female Genital Mutilation, and how the Digital Champion programme set up with Hope for Girls and Women is contributing. You can see her slides here.

We next heard from Youthmapper Ambassador Laura Mugeha about mapping towards progress in the Sustainable Development Goals.

Finally Ezekiel Kassanga from Tumaini Open School for girls excluded from education by pregnancy explained how mapping helps their work. His slides are here.

We were delighted to be joined by many of our interns.  We are hoping to repeat this programme helping to get young African women their first step on the GIS ladder once we have enough funds to support their data costs. 

You can access the recording of the event here.  We will be holding another on March 29th so please join us if you can. Link to register is here 

Thank you again for your support!

Janet 

On 7th November we celebrated our 6th birthday with an online event hearing from many of the community groups we have worked with or trained over the last 6 years.

We started with an overview of our work which you can see here and review the slides here. Next we heard about the school mapping and nutrition projects. This was followed by presentations about mapping maize mills to prevent stunting and poor nutrition, and training Youthmappers by the Reslience Academy and OMDTZ, and how mapping helps with progress towards the SDGs.  

And Rhobi talked about how her Digital Champions programme is helping to protect girls in Serengeti, Tarime and Butiama districts, as well as teach them digital skills. 

She will also be talking at our next event on Monday for GeoWeek - I hope you can join us to find out more. 

This month we are also looking forward to training many new mappers in Katavi and other areas of Tanzania, as well as speaking at State of the Map Africa and the HOTOSM summit.

And we have this cool new film summarising our work.

So thank you so much for your support.

Many thanks

Janet