Author: Janet Chapman

Yesterday 23rd June 2017 under the Crowd2Map project;

Janet Chapman  “on the ground”  with the girls at the safe house started off  by making all the necessary configurations and  setting up phones for training more volunteers on how to create navigable maps of local areas in Tanzania to help rescue and allocate innocent girls who are  being forced to undergo Female Genital Mutilation (FGM).

We greatly thank the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap for offering this grant for purchasing these phones and all the necessary peripherals.
Volunteers were further trained on how to use smartphones to collect and help capture the where about of all the girls likely to face the  risk of Female Genital Mutilation.

Continue reading “An Applaud to the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap team” →

Jianting Zhao is an Azavea Summer of Maps Fellow and is working with Crowd2Map to analyse the cases of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) by location in Tanzania.

Azavea is an award winning software development, analysis and visualisation firm that applies Geospatial technology for civic social and environmental impact. The summer with GIS background with select non-profit organisations to work on spatial analysis projects in this Crowd Sourced Mapping to Support Sustainable Development and help prevent FGM in Rural Tanzania” Project, Jionting will visualise how FGM incidents are distributed and what factors affect FGM cases.

On 22nd August 2017, Jionting will be presenting her work to anyone who is interested in this topic please join us on zoom where you will be able to listen to the presentation and ask questions. Link will be emailed to registered participants 24 hrs before the event. The event will also be recorded.

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/crowdsourced-mapping-to-support-sustainable-development-and-help-prevent-fgm-in-rural-tanzania-tickets-35490828022

On Tuesday 20th June Janet Chapman, Campaigns Manager for Tanzania Development Trust and Co-founder of Crowd2map with Egle Ramanauskaite from the Human Computation Institute  will be going to Tanzania for a month to kick start our community mapping programme funded by a Humanitarian OpenStreetMap  (HOT) Microgrant. This will allow us to purchase phones and deliver training to 48 village level Community Change Agents every month in 4 areas of Tanzania so that they can map their villages into OpenStreetMap.

This will include adding water points, schools, clinics, places of employment and Government offices to enable development in these areas of extreme poverty, and help protect girls from Female Genital Mutilation and Child Marriage. You can follow our progress on Facebook and Twitter .

Thank you so much!

On Wednesday 8 th June 2017 we had a successful mapathon at CMAST with a live link to London and Safe house when they made 5000 changes to kulimi, 500 buildings, 200 km roads and had a great time.

Thank you to everyone at CMAST! 

even for these encouraging quotes;

• A useful and fun activity for any team! “Jan”
•  Touching!- “Alan”.
• It’s nice to be able to contribute in such an easy way! “Richard”
• It was a revelation to be able to do so much with so little.- “Sven”.
• What a great evening hearing Rhobi’s story  was touching, i am proud to have helped her.-“Anneleen”
• Everyone can contribute ,and you can really make a difference and help people in need ! “Allen”.

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If you would like to organize similar Mapathon at your office please get in touch!

CMAST

Our story has been featured in Broadly – a digital media channel by Vice media, focused exclusively on issues that matter most to women.

Read the excellent article by Florence Wilkinson here: https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/these-women-figured-out-a-way-to-map-and-find-girls-at-risk-of-fgm

Our project has now been set up on the MapSwipe app by the Missing Maps! Many thanks to Gabor from Missing Maps who helped us do that!

HOW DOES IT WORK?

If you don’t have access to a PC (or have just a few minutes standing in a queue or riding a bus or train!), you can still map on OpenStreetMap via MapSwipe! Just download the app on your Android phone or iPhone, and select the Prevent FGM: Singida, Tanzania 2 task:

It’s very simple after than – swipe through “screenshots” of satellite imagery and click on the tiles that have at least one building. (Click twice if you’re unsure!)

Don’t forget to save your progress, complete more tasks, level up… 

By doing that you will make it a lot easier for us to identify residential areas & extend the efforts of the Mugumu Safe House to fight FGM!

THANK YOU & HAVE FUN SWIPE-MAPPING!

We have been running community training in rural Tanzania to get locals to map their own communities with the Maps.me app on their phones. The only problem is –  very few people in Tanzania have access to a smartphone.

But you can help

If you have an unused Android phone hidden away in your drawer, you can send it to us. We will freshen it up & donate it to selected community members in rural Tanzania who will use it to put their community on the map and train others.

If you are anywhere in the London area, you could contact Janet directly & deliver your phone this way. We could also collect phones personally in Lithuania & Tanzania, or you can just send it to us from anywhere in the world!

Please fill out this form if you’d like to donate a phone or contact us!

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We are also starting a Community Change Agents program very soon, and even with the funding received from the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team, we still need phones more than ever.

Don’t let your old phone waste away! Donate it for a good cause – and ask your friends & relatives to do the same!

For the first time, Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) is running a microgrants scheme, and we are one of the 10 awarded projects!

Crowd2Map Tanzania is going to receive $5,000, which will enable us to buy phones and train local Community Change Agents in rural Tanzania. Community Change Agents will be able to organize mapping in their local regions. This will help us gather knowledge which would otherwise not be possible – locals will name villages, enter points of interest and otherwise support our efforts to build comprehensive maps of rural Tanzania on OpenStreetMap.

We hope that this program is going to allow us to further fight FGM, address issues related to land rights, microfinance, and youth entrepreneurship, and map as many as 346 villages.

Many thanks to HOT & their generous sponsors for this opportunity. Read this post to know more about the other grantees!

We are continuing to map the region of Tanzania where FGM is prevalent, and we are making a big mapping boom tomorrow, for International Women’s Day!

A Mapping party will be held at Technarium, Vilnius (Lithuania), joined by satellite locations in the UK, Tanzania and elsewhere around the world!

We will be mapping this task: http://tasks.hotosm.org/project/2501

If you’d like to join us for some mapping on the day, just get in touch, or connect on the day via the links below:

• live video link: https://zoom.us/j/222868593
• etherpad for asking questions and sharing contacts: https://etherpad.net/p/mapping_IWD17
• twitter instructions: https://twitter.com/Crowd2Map/status/839082289812418560