Maps of Kibera are hard to come by (Image: Francesco Zizola/Noor/Eyevine)

The slums of Kibera in Nairobi, Kenya, the factory district of Chittagong, Bangladesh, villages in the Haitian hills – pull up these places on Google Maps and you will find little more than grey blobs with a sparse criss-cross of roads.

Yet maps are a vital resource, especially when deciding what infrastructure to build or in the event of a humanitarian crisis. Now teams of mappers are working to chart some of the most obscure corners of the developing world using OpenStreetMap (OSM), the citizen-mapping tool that today has over 1 million registered users. By sending out volunteers across the globe, the Humanitarian OSM Team (HOT) aims to create collaborative maps that can be used by aid and development agencies.

For example, if you want to install new sanitary facilities in a slum, says HOT’s president Mikel Maron, you need data on the location of existing toilets, the condition they’re in, who owns them and so on. Accurate maps enable facilities to be built in optimal locations.


Absentee mappers

Google’s Map Maker tool also allows users to build collaborative community maps. The software has had a lot of success in countries like Pakistan, which have large expat populations who tend to go online from abroad to map their hometowns, says Manik Gupta, Google Maps’ Group Product Manager. “The interesting thing there is that you don’t have to be physically living in a place to map it,” says Gupta.

The problem is that most residents of places like Kibera don’t have a computer, let alone use Google’s services. The advantage of OpenStreetMap is that, whereas Google controls how people access its data, location information in OpenStreetMap is open to anyone.

For instance, the Map Kibera project plotted the area’s electoral district boundaries in the run-up to Kenya’s general election in March. They printed the maps and passed them around the community so people would know where to go to vote. It was information that had never been made accessible before. “Things as simple as electoral boundaries are the basic geometry of democracy,” says Maron. “Making them available to citizens is a really basic thing that needs to happen.”

(See different maps of the Kibera slums in Google Maps and OpenStreetMap.)

Corporate watchdog

OSM data can help keep tabs on corporate behaviour too. In April, a textile factory collapsed in Dhaka, Bangladesh, killing over 1000 people. To try to prevent this happening elsewhere, HOT volunteers mapped the dense tangle of buildings in the factory district of Chittagong, 200 kilometres away. They want to label the buildings with the names of the firms for which they make clothing, such as H&M, Levi Strauss and Timberland. HOT hopes this will encourage the companies to monitor conditions more closely.

Since the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, meanwhile, HOT mappers have taken to dirt bikes with GPS units mounted on the handlebars, to map the footpaths and byways of remote towns and villages. Local coordinator Brian Wolford also took photos with a helmet cam, and aims to build them into a Google Street View-type service for Haitian back roads.

In La Boquilla, Columbia, OSM’s Humberto Yances explored a nearby lagoon by canoe, gathering geotagged photos and GPS data. The point is to build maps which give the local community, which is reliant on fishing for its livelihood, a baseline to help it deal with developers who want to build up the area to attract tourists. Understanding which parts of their lagoon will be affected by the developments is key to making the right decisions about what to allow.

The OSM project is one of several working to map lesser-known areas, including the UN’s Global Map project and the International Steering Committee for Global Mapping.

“As we know from developed countries, maps are very attractive, relevant and popular,” says Georg Gartner, president of the International Cartographic Association. “I see no reason why this might be different in developing countries and I predict a huge demand for maps and mapping products and related applications.”