News

Mozambique is a country of 25 million people on the east coast of Africa, often beset by natural disasters ranging from severe drought to...

Guest post by Kathryn Davis, Columbia University.January 14th, 10:30am. We arrive in Chang'ombe ward (an industrial area in Dar es Salaam) after weaving in and out of traffic in the project bajaj (rickshaw) through different neighborhoods. Johannes Peter, a seasoned mapper with the Dar Ramani Huria project, takes another look at his drone imagery printout of the area, and indicates that we’ve arrived at our starting point.Mappers like Johannes detail key drainage and water infrastructure that hasn't been digitized before, and that can be used for disaster risk reduction planning and flood resilience. Almost immediately, we see drainage on the right side of the wide dirt road, and mark it on the map...

Great progress on a crowd-sourced public transportation map for Managua! Through our crowd-funding initiative, we were able to raise $6,212 dollars and with this they enabled us to print the city's bus map 40,000 times.

When I was first told about mapping, I thought it was something to do sitting indoors on your laptop. Well, it’s also a bit like that, but little did I know the adventure that awaited me. I quickly got acquainted with the whole mapping process after the training we received on the first two days (ed: 11 and 12 January). Earlier I had met Douglas Ssebaggala who had showed us how to use OpenMapKit and JOSM. I just couldn’t wait to start my journey in the world. After the training, I felt I was ready.

As we enter our second week in Mbale, we've started surveying the surrounding districts of Sironko, Manafwu and Baduda today (Monday, January 18th). These...

The Mapping Financial Inclusion in Uganda project is truly underway as we enter our second week of training in Mbale, Uganda. HOT is currently at the Uganda Christian University (UCU) introducing 30 local students to various open source tools with the assistance of students from Makerere University. There will be two days of training before we head out into the field on Wednesday to start mapping the district of Mbale.

There is no map for the 42 bus lines in Metropolitan Managua, capital of Nicaragua, where 80% of the 2 million inhabitants that are dependent on buses to commute to work or school. But engaged citizens used Free Technology and the power of collaboration to create the first digital public transportation map.

As we near the end of the year, there’s many stories that stand out and define the past year. One that I’d like to highlight here is a positive one - the continuation of the sharp decline of absolute poverty over the past year.One of the factors that’s shown to contribute to raising people’s standards of living, especially for those living on next to nothing, is financial inclusion. And one of the success stories here is the rise of mobile money - at number 5 in the Gates Foundation list of Good News stories for 2015: “Mobile Banking Exceeds Our Optimistic Projections”.The mobile money sector in countries like Uganda is growing at an enormous pace, processing over 500 million transactions in 2015, with many more people using mobile money than a traditional bank account - and these services only came into existence six years ago!With the HOT project on “Mapping Financial Services” in Uganda (more background on the CGAP blog here), we’ll be updating, opening up and increasing access to data on financial services, and specifically mobile money services, for Uganda. With only a short time to go until we start our field survey on January 5th, the project team is working hard to finalize our training curriculum, logistics and mapping process.

HOT Indonesia has been working with Australian Government since March 2011. Initially the pilot project focus on the use of OpenStreetMap (OSM) data as...

The Humanitarian Innovation Fund recently published HOT's latest OpenAerialMap blog post written by Cristiano Giovando: http://www.elrha.org/hif-blog/openaerialmap-final-blog/  

Every year during the rainy season, the largest city in Tanzania, Dar es Salaam, suffers from devastating floods that wipe out roads, destroy houses, and result in deaths, sickness, and millions of dollars worth of damages. By helping communities to map their wards, the Ramani Huria project is able to support disaster prevention and response to areas that were previously off the map, literally. One key element of these maps is drainage systems. We have dedicated mappers working to ensure these, as well as wetland zones and flood-prone areas, are included accurately in our maps.

Inspired by our response to the West Africa Ebola epidemic, a grant was generously made by the Hewlett Foundation to HOT in late 2014. This funding was aimed at improving the ability of HOT to fulfill its large scale and long running Ebola response, as well as have the capacity to respond to future events. It was determined by the community that the grant be divided and focus on three projects, addressing the development of the online tools Field Papers and the Export Tool, as well as building the numbers of Activation Coordinators.

The ward of Tandale was one of the first wards in Dar es Salaam to benefit from community mapping and be comprehensively mapped on OpenStreetMap. Ramani Huria recently spoke to Ward Executive Officer for Tandale Mr. Osiligi Lossai about how they are using the data and maps provided to the ward following the completion of mapping.

The Ramani Huria team was proud to be part of the first Africa Open Data Conference in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. The event drew speakers and attendees from all over the world, to discuss, debate and showcase ‘local and global examples of open data being produced, published, visualized, and captured in creative ways across Africa.’