Volunteers around the world are helping to trace roads and buildings making navigable maps, which allow rescuers to get help to stranded girls

An online crowdmapping tool being used to chart unmarked villages in remote parts of Tanzania is helping young runaways escaping female genital mutilation (FGM) find their way to safety.

Last month global mappers, working with people on the ground in Tanzania, caused the disruption of a planned FGM ceremony on a teenage girl by using open-source maps and smartphones to find her. The 16 year old was freed from the home in which she had been locked ahead of the ceremony, which though illegal under Tanzanian law is still practised in some regions. An estimated 15% of women and girls aged between 15 and 49 in the country have undergone the procedure.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Wambura Kisika, a legal officer at the Mugumu safehouse safe house, demonstrates the technology. Photograph: Sophie Tremblay

Since May, nearly 600 international mappers have worked to help fill in the map around a safe house for girls running away from FGM and other gender-based violence located in Mugumu in the Serengeti district. Their work has resulted in the rescue of several girls and one arrest. Volunteers use satellite photographs on OpenStreetMap, a free crowd-sourced mapping service, to trace roads and buildings from the images, missing from printed and other online maps, and turn them into navigable maps. Other, more veteran mapping volunteers verify their peers’ work.

Run by Crowd2Map, the open-source maps are then downloaded to apps like MAPS.ME and Crowd2Map recruit people on the ground, with smartphones, to use the app to name the remote towns and villages, as well as add in the names of schools, medical clinics and shops. At the start of 2016 there were 735 buildings and less than 5,000km of road mapped in the Serengeti district. Thanks to the efforts of thousands of volunteers, the map now counts 277,198 buildings and nearly 22,000km of road.

“I think it’s a direct reaction to everything that’s going on in the world right now, where people can feel quite impotent in the face of a lot of things going on at a political, global scale at the moment,” said Sophia Robson, a volunteer mapper based in London who was involved in last month’s rescue. “This is something you can actually take into your own hands and do.”

This is something you can actually take into your own hands and do Sophia Robson

Robson, who sometimes spends 12 hours a day mapping, said it doesn’t take any special skills to become a mapper and anyone with an internet connection and a desire to create a positive change in the world can help.

“When you click ‘complete’ at the end of that half hour or that hour, you have achieved a goal, you have achieved something that is a positive response to something that is really quite indescribable in its horribleness,” she said.

In last month’s rescue, the mappers went to work after a neighbour of the teenager made contact with the Mugumu safehouse.

“We received a message that a girl in Nyamoko village was to be circumcised that evening. Her neighbour said she was badly beaten and was being kept locked in a room after she had tried to escape,” said Wambura Kisika, a legal officer at the safe house. Last year, 233 girls took refuge there during the so-called ‘cutting season’ – late November to mid-December when teenage girls, who are home for the holidays, are forced to undergo FGM.

A search for Nyamoko on Google Maps does not yield any results. In fact, the entire region north of the Serengeti National Park is mostly blank on Google Maps, with only a handful of villages shown. Kisika knew his team had to act quickly but no-one knew where Nyamoko village was. The team used new phone software, which also works offline, and MAPS.ME, enabling them to locate the village. Kisika was able to locate the girl’s house and rescue her based on information from villagers, but he ultimately credits the map.

“We have a challenge of not knowing all the villages. Some remote villages, we don’t know them, where they are,” said Rhobi Samwelly, the Mugumu safe house director. “It makes our work very difficult during the cutting season.”

With the new detailed map of their region, Samwelly and Kisika have been using the MAPS.ME smartphone app to rescue more girls in remote villages. The maps works offline, which means they don’t always need an internet connection.



Crowdmapping is a key tool for health and humanitarian work

Crowdmapping is being used as a tool to help solve other humanitarian problems. The Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (Hot), a spinoff of the mapping service, was formed in 2010. Volunteers have come together to create maps following crises such as the Nepal earthquake and West African ebola outbreak.

In 2014, the American and British Red Cross and Médecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) together with Hot launched the Missing Maps project. In August 2016 yellow fever broke out in Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Volunteers with Missing Maps helped MSF conduct its largest mass vaccination campaign - in just 10 days vaccinating 720,000 people before the disease spread.

“When patients present with diseases, we ask them where they’re from and if we don’t know where those locations are then we can’t analyse the disease spread. We can’t back track it to a source or predict where it’s moving in the future,” said Pete Masters, MSF project co-ordinator. “Missing Maps has allowed us to do that.”

The Crowd2Map project is currently looking for volunteers to complete another area of the Serengeti district with high rates of FGM through OpenStreetMap to help create routes to another safe house in Tarime. See www.crowd2map.wordpress.com/ for further details

Get involved

Anyone with an internet connection can help map currently poorly mapped places such as rural Tanzania. Here are four tips on how to get started:





1) Create an account on OpenStreetMap, an open sourced map accessible to all. https://www.openstreetmap.org/

2) Identify a mapping task from the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap tasking manager: http://tasks.hotosm.org/. There are full instructions and a background for mapping the safe house project at http://bit.ly/FGMTanz17

3) Attend a Missing Maps ‘mapping party’. Missing Maps runs regular mapping parties in London and other locations, details here http://www.missingmaps.org/events/

4) Download Maps.Me smartphone application and add places to the map while visiting under-mapped locations