The five-year (2020-2025) USAID Local Impact Governance Activity (Local Impact) supports the Government of the Republic of Zambia’s (GRZ) decentralization agenda by strengthening local governance, devolved service delivery, and ensuring that service delivery is transparent and responsive to citizen needs.

The project will help Zambia build up a sub-national system of governance for devolved service delivery more responsive to citizen needs, expand the capabilities of district-level governance bodies to deliver sustainable development outcomes, increase effective citizen and private-sector involvement in development planning and monitoring, and improve public financial management and domestic revenue generation.

Products that will be developed from the project will be used in the following ways:

• Citizens will use them to improve their collective skills to effectively assess service-delivery needs and performance and constructively engage with the government.
• The datasets and products will be used by sub-national governance systems to become more responsive to citizen needs, expand revenue, and improve service-delivery outcomes.
• The project will generate learning and facilitate problem-solving that supports the development of an effective, financially viable sub-national governance system for devolved services, capable of being scaled up throughout Zambia
• Stakeholders from government, civil society, communities, researchers, development partners will use the products in decision making and design programs to enhance local governance.

The project is funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and implemented by DAI with support for the service delivery mapping component from the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT). Key partners are the Government of Zambia (Ministry of Local Government), civil society organizations, and local stakeholders.

The project is directly implemented by HOT through it’s Global Projects Manager, an Associate project manager, 2 Senior Mapping Supervisors, Technical advisor and Specialist with support from the Global Field Program team. OSM & YouthMappers from Zambia, validators from the Philippines, Data Quality Interns, and the global OSM community contributing to field data collection, remote mapping, and validation, respectively.

The 5-year project covers an inception phase (consultations & desk reviews), remote mapping and validation, stakeholders engagement, field data collection, zone boundaries mapping, key stakeholders capacity strengthening, data cleaning, and map products development in 27 districts across 3 provinces in Zambia.

The project’s mapping activity runs from November 12, 2020 – June 30, 2025. In Years 1 & 2 the project will conduct service delivery and zone mapping across 18 districts while years 3 & 4 will cover the remaining 9 districts. These activities include remote mapping and validation of all districts, data collectors recruitment and training, mapathons and other capacity building activities.