Annual Reports

2022-2023 Impact Report

In this year’s impact report, we reflect on HOT’s transformations since its creation in 2010 after the Haiti Earthquake. Following our new Living Strategy, we aim to consolidate ourselves as a catalyst for community-driven open mapping, which we have done through our four Regional Hubs, as this report showcases. You will also find exciting technological advances and new milestones, as we move closer to mapping an area home to one billion people.

2021-22 Impact Report

The 2021-22 Impact Report is a virtual world tour of humanitarian open mapping projects around the globe. We spotlight projects in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, Uganda and Nepal, and we’ll also make stops in more than 40 other countries where the open mapping movement is touching people’s lives. The Impact Report is an exploration of the intersection between technology and the global open mapping movement and the extraordinary impact it is having in global communities.

2020-21 Annual Report

This past year, Covid-19 exposed the world’s devastating inequalities, disproportionately affecting the communities we serve in low- and middle-income countries. Supported by the H2H Network, HOT coordinated its most extensive crisis mapping activation in history to identify where at-risk populations live and where data on health infrastructure is missing. We also set up HOT’s first-ever Rapid Response Microgrants, quickly mobilizing funds to seven OSM communities looking to support the pandemic response in their countries. Beyond Covid-19 response, we opened regional hubs in the Asia Pacific and Eastern and Southern Africa and supported 27 communities with grants that contributed to the training of over 1,700 people in creating and using OSM data.

2019 Annual Report

The HOT community came together in 2019 at unprecedented levels to meet new humanitarian demands. Responding to Cyclone Idai, over 4,000 community members created maps used on the ground by the IFRC and MSF. Community grants in Peru, Tanzania and Zambia made a real impact on the digital gender divide, and new projects were launched in the Philippines to map some of the country’s largest cities and in the DRC to respond to the Ebola outbreak. Remote teams and individuals mapped every road in Indonesia, contributed to “Ayuda Venezuela”, mapped wildfires in Bolivia and areas affected by Hurricane Dorian in the Bahamas. By the end of 2019, we neared a major milestone - 200,000 mappers. Read more…

2018 Annual Report

In 2018 the HOT community continued to build a map of the world where individuals and communities can represent themselves. This involved South Sudanese refugees mapping refugee settlements in Uganda, supporting displaced Venezuelans in the Caribbean, and mapping dense, flood-prone urban areas in Accra, Kampala, and Monrovia as part of Open Cities Africa. We also strived for greater inclusion of unrepresented communities, such as women and girls, by supporting these groups through providing Microgrants and the WomenConnect project in Peru and Tanzania. Our contributor community grew from 100,000 to nearly 160,000 people. Read more…

2017 Annual Report

In 2017 the HOT global community activated a total of 11 times for disaster responses, delivering critical base map data to humanitarian partner organizations. HOT also pioneered new approaches for working directly with Syrian refugees in Turkey and South Sudanese refugees in Uganda. By teaching use of OpenStreetMap to document services (and gaps) in their new countries, refugees and host community members took an active role in humanitarian response, pushing the system to become more accountable to the populations it seeks to serve. HOT also pioneered new methods of open data collection to make cities more resilient to natural hazards. Read more…

2016 Annual Report

In 2016 HOT joined the Global Alliance for Urban Crisis, and furthered our work in one of the world’s largest metropolitan areas (Jakarta, Indonesia) and Africa’s fastest-growing city (Dar es Salaam, Tanzania). HOT projects contributed to 11 different SDGs, and with a team of dedicated mappers in Uganda, HOT mapped more than 21,000 financial access points, fundamental to enabling local people to become more economically stable, prosperous and resilient. Our rapid response mapping community was activated for six disasters across Latin America and the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia. Read more…

2015 Annual Report

2015 was HOT’s five year anniversary and a year of unprecedented growth with burgeoning community involvement, increased financial contributions, robust collaboration with multiple renowned partners and our largest and most complex disaster response activation ever in Nepal. We also held our first annual HOT Summit, addressing effective humanitarian and economic development uses of OpenStreetMap (OSM), the world’s premier source of open geospatial data. Read more…