News — 27 May, 2016
New project: “Real Time Financial Location Planning and Research”
Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) announces it is a Grand Challenges Explorations winner, an initiative funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. HOT will pursue an innovative global health and development research project, titled “Real Time Financial Location Planning and Research”.
Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team Receives Grand Challenges Explorations Grant For Groundbreaking Research in Global Health and Development
Washington DC - Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) announced today that it is a Grand Challenges Explorations winner, an initiative funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. HOT will pursue an innovative global health and development research project, titled “Real Time Financial Location Planning and Research”.
Grand Challenges Explorations (GCE) funds individuals worldwide to explore ideas that can break the mold in how we solve persistent global health and development challenges. HOT’s project is one of more than 40 Grand Challenges Explorations grants announced today by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
To receive funding, HOT and other Grand Challenges Explorations winners demonstrated in a two-page online application a bold idea in one of five critical global health and development topic areas. The foundation will be accepting applications for the next GCE round in September 2016.
The Idea
More and more financial service location data is being made freely and openly available on OpenStreetMap (OSM), beginning with a 2015 Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) pilot project in Uganda with support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. This new project, with continued support, aims to put that data to work for both financial service providers and beneficiaries through a set of two (mobile) web apps. These apps encompass the entire data lifecycle, from searching for existing service locations to empowering the “crowd” to update details, to analyzing service locations for gaps in coverage, to discovering optimal areas for new service locations based on combinations with other data, such as population density, network coverage and travel distance. Each app reinforces the other and as new service locations and details are captured, they are made immediately available for analysis by service providers.
Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team will develop a simple-to-use application for digital financial providers to analyze their agent network coverage and help discover optimal future locations through an interactive web-based interface. This OpenStreetMap-based app helps providers to target future focus areas by selecting a set of filter options, running a query, and viewing a visualization of results in real-time.
About Grand Challenges Explorations
Grand Challenges Explorations winner is a US$100 million initiative funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Launched in 2008, over 1186 projects in more than 61 countries have received Grand Challenges Explorations grants. The grant program is open to anyone from any discipline and from any organization. The initiative uses an agile, accelerated grant-making process with short two-page online applications and no preliminary data required. Initial grants of US$100,000 are awarded two times a year. Successful projects have the opportunity to receive a follow-on grant of up to US$1 million.
About Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT)
The Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) applies the principles of open source and open data sharing for humanitarian response and economic development by engaging volunteers who collectively create online, the maps that enable responders to reach those in need. HOT supports mapping projects that assist people to create their own maps for socio-economic development and disaster preparedness while developing several open source programs and applications. Many of the poorest and most vulnerable places in the world do not exist on any map. To data over 3,500 HOT volunteers have collectively made 12 million edits to OpenStreetMap and put 7.5 million people on the map.
Mapping financial services in Jinja, Uganda