Under a blazing sun in Mali’s capital, Amadou Menta leant over to measure a gutter then jotted down the results on a mapping app on his smartphone. “We’re collecting data,” said the 27-year-old geography student, helping to chart the roadside drains of central Bamako with two friends.
Until recently Mali’s capital was largely uncharted on the web. With street names or fixed public transport routes often missing in the city of some two million, people tend to ask for directions to find their way. But the lack of maps is a major obstacle to developing its infrastructure, whether to prevent traffic jams, collect wastewater and rubbish, or prevent flooding.
Tech-savvy young Malians are striving to change this, cataloguing the city’s features in the hope it will improve the lives of its residents. Armed with smartphones, dozens of volunteers have been collecting data for the local branch of OpenStreetMap, a free, online geographic database, which is then used by sites including Google Maps.
Menta and fellow mappers have been charting the channels collecting waste and rainwater in Daoudabougou, a central district often hit by floods. The project is receiving financial support from the World Bank, and has been welcomed by the authorities.
But it’s just one of the avenues the group is exploring – and there is plenty more work to do. Founder Nathalie Sidibe said there was previously “no freely available data in Mali”.
“We saw mapping as a concrete way to contribute to developing the area,” she said. “We need to change habits here, and to do that, we need to encourage people to use digital tools.”
Mobile data access is still poor in Mali. Countrywide, only one in 10 women is connected to mobile broadband, compared to one in five men, a World Bank report found in 2021.
But the OpenStreetMap Mali team has been busy. So far, its volunteers have drawn up a map of Bamako’s public minibus routes, household waste collection points, and basic social services. Adama Konate, deputy mayor in charge of sanitation, said the group’s efforts had helped Bamako. “We only had basic knowledge before this project,” Konate said. “Now we know that this place needs drainage, and that place needs a rubbish dump.”
Mahamadou Wadidie, director of the Regional Development Agency in Bamako, said the youth mapping project had made his job much easier. On the agency’s website, he showed off a regularly updated map of all the health centres and schools in Bamako drawn up from OpenStreetMap data. “Instead of taking two months to find out about these things, mayors can now get this information from their computer,” he said. “Digitisation is allowing us to get ahead, to lose less time.”
Mali – an impoverished country with severe governance challenges that has been battling a decade-long jihadist insurgency – does not have many resources to devote to digitising data, he said. But Menta and his young colleagues, he said, have shown it is possible to launch ambitious mapping projects “without spending a lot of money”. (Source: ©AFP 29/8 2022)
In 2018 Bamako was one of 12 cities across Africa chosen to participate in Open Cities Africa, an initiative of the Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR) funded by the World Bank that supports the collection of open-source risk information through citizen engagement and the development of data products to support local decision-making. The number of cities involved has since risen to sixteen. The project is implemented through a unique partnership between GFDRR and the World Bank, city governments across the continent, and a partner community comprised of regional scientific and technology organizations, development partners, and technology companies. Find out more about Open Cities Africa here.
In Cameroon, Ngaoundéré was the first city to benefit from the project. Like many urban areas in Africa, it has seen a rapid increase in its population, from roughly 180,000 in 2005 to almost 290,000 in 2020. This urban growth has been largely unplanned, with rural migrants often occupying areas within flood plains or along mountain slopes, vulnerable to flooding and rock falls. Such disasters regularly wreak havoc on citizens’ lives and lead to increased exposure to disease, food shortages, and financial vulnerabilities. This nexus of rapid, unplanned urban growth and increased exposure to natural hazards is especially problematic for local governments who lack data to formulate accurate and efficient policy responses. How do you address a problem you cannot measure?
Over the last four years, inputs from a diverse range of stakeholders have increased the availability of data and led to the production of a “tangible Risk Atlas”, which the Ngaoundéré City Council (NCC) is now using to inform urban management and planning.
The approach has enabled the team to map over 300 km² of urban area combining inputs from local residents, with data from the municipality and new drone imagery. All this is now available online through the Risk Atlas and in OpenStreetMap. The initiative was coordinated with the World Bank-financed Cameroon Inclusive and Resilient Cities Project (CIRCP) that is being implemented by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development (MINHDU).
The updated data has helped local authorities demonstrate the challenges in Ngaoundéré and successfully advocate for central government funding to invest in risk mitigation, for instance in adjusting waterways to improve stormwater runoff. The NCC is also exploring the use of the data for broader purposes, such as the development of an own-source revenue system to manage property taxes. Based on the success in Ngaoundéré, a similar project to map risk-prone areas was launched in Cameroon’s capital, Yaoundé. The US Department of State also supported participatory mapping in Douala, through its Secondary Cities program.
The accomplishments of the Open Cities Ngaoundéré project can be attributed to its collaborative approach that recognised the value of numerous stakeholders: when it comes to urban management and resilience, everybody has a role.
The story is similar in cities across Africa such as Brazzaville and Accra. In Zanzibar, a Spatial Data Infrastructure will serve as a repository for urban and disaster risk management. In Antananarivo, Madagascar, over 100 kilometers of mapped drainage will inform flood protection and urban upgrading projects. This 2020 report gives full details of the aims and methodologies of the project.
For further information about the Africa Research Bulletin:
Economic, Financial and Technical Series: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/14676346
Political, Social and Cultural Series: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/1467825x
