The Missing Maps initiative aims to chart slums around the world as a way of fighting disease outbreaks and hastening development
JUST south of Dhaka, Bangladesh, sits one of the world's largest slums, Kamrangirchar. Although hundreds of thousands of people call it home, it has never been mapped.
That's about to change. On 19 November Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) will launch a project called Missing Maps. The goal is to build basic maps for the settlement and many like it across the developing world. The organisation hopes to improve the lives of millions by helping locate everything from gaps in infrastructure to the sources of pollution and disease.
"Dhaka is pretty well mapped," says project leader Ivan Gayton. "But Kamrangirchar, which is one of the most polluted places on the planet, is a black hole."
To make the maps, MSF will give volunteers smartphones they can use to note the location of the features in their neighbourhood, down to each house and water pump. The detail will be added to a digital map called OpenStreetMap that's free to use. Volunteers will be allowed to keep the phones after the project is over, and MSF hopes this will seed the creation of a local chapter of mappers who will keep Kamrangirchar's digital representation up to date.
Those who do not get phones will still be able to contribute. Printed sections of Kamrangirchar's OpenStreetMap will be available for volunteers to annotate with the locations of churches, hospitals, schools and water sources. Each sheet of paper carries a barcode that will allow MSF workers to simply snap a photo of the finished paper map and have it automatically upload to the proper location on OpenStreetMap.
Accurate maps are crucial to fighting all kinds of diseases and sickness. Cholera outbreaks can be contained if medical workers can trace the source of tainted water – but to do that, they need to know where the people who are affected live. Gayton previously oversaw MSF's mission in Zamfara, Nigeria, where in 2010 the worst lead poisoning outbreak ever recorded killed 111 children. He says maps are crucial for tracing these types of illnesses as well.
"Mapping is foundational for us," says Gayton. "Where's the toxicity in the drinking water coming from? Where do you put the clinic?" These are questions that MSF needs maps to answer.
Even the Ebola outbreak in West Africa would have been easier to fight with better maps. After the virus began spreading earlier this year, an organisation called the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team recruited hundreds of online volunteers and mapped three cities in West Africa in just 20 hours. This helped medical workers find, isolate and treat people who may have come into contact with the virus. Having such maps at the outset wouldn't have stopped the outbreak, but it might have prevented it from escalating.
Terra incognita
Other diseases are extremely simple to control with proper mapping. "Chlorination is my favourite intervention ever," Gayton says. "I just have to figure out where people are getting their choleric water, then send one person with a syringe full of chlorine. You ask everyone who fills up their jerrycan if they would like some chlorine in there. You can cover huge sections of the city."
Millions of people around the world live in unmapped urban environments, presenting huge public health risks. "In south Somalia to this day you can't figure out where a town is, and there are huge swathes of the Congo that are terra incognita," Gayton says.
MSF's online crowdsourcing approach is letting the organisation build the sort of detailed maps of the world's poorest places that tech giants Google and Microsoft have so far been unable to create. Their programme is more ambitious than anything similar that has come before, says Peter Lance of the University of Carolina, who worked on slum mapping in Dhaka in 2005. "The great thing about people power is that it allows small organisations to leverage large numbers of people who are willing to help."
Ramnath Subbaraman of Harvard School of Public Health in Boston says that maps can improve life in developing cities beyond just fighting illness. "The urban landscape in these settings is very disorientating, even for people who live there," he says. In a recent trip to Kaula Bandar slum in Mumbai, India, Subbaraman's team found just 29 per cent of infants were vaccinated against common diseases, despite there being a free vaccination centre within walking distance. "Many people didn't know that there was a health clinic within 1 kilometre where they could get free immunisation," he says.
A rich OpenStreetMap entry for a city can speed its development as well, Subbaraman says. "If you look within slums there are areas of settlements that are legal or non-legal." Walking through such areas, the juxtaposition is stark, he says – you can see water infrastructure disappear within a few lanes. Mapping this patchwork of resources makes advocacy possible.
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