At the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team global conference on Friday December 4 2020, Herry Kasunga talked about the Water Source mapping project that he has been coordinating with the Hope for Girls and Women digital champions.
This is an extremely important project as the majority of people in Mara, and in the rest of Tanzania, are dependent on rainwater for household water, sanitation and to grow their food.
It is also estimated that 40% of village water sources are degraded or non-functional. The shots below show some of the water points used by the digital champions:
In addition, climate change further threatens water access and means droughts and average temperature rises are likely, coupled with intense flooding events with significant damage to infrastructure and livelihoods, meaning mapping will become even more important.
Herry’s presentation slides can be viewed and downloaded here.
As well as water points, maps are also used by the Hope for Girls and Women team to send rescue teams to girls who are imminently at risk of FGM. It is often very challenging reaching these cases which are often in very remote areas, in villages that do not appear on maps. The Crowd2Map team, with a global cohort of 16,000 virtual volunteers, works on improving this on a daily basis.
Find out more about the work being done to map vast unmapped areas of Tanzania by visiting the Crowd2Map website.
Find out about upcoming Open StreetMap events via their website here.
