Putting the Forgotten on the Map

One Thursday evening in February 2016, in a hotel in central Paris, about sixty people opened their laptops.

They did not all know each other. Most were neither geographers nor doctors. For three hours, they looked at satellite images of Uganda. And with the tip of the mouse, they traced what they saw: roofs, roads, paths.

By the end of the evening, they had added more than 4,000 buildings and nearly 170 kilometres of road to the map.

That evening is called a mapathon, a mapping marathon.

In the age of maps on our phones, we forget that millions of people live in places that appear on no map at all. No street names. No buildings drawn. For relief teams, these people are almost invisible.

Yet to fight an epidemic, you need to know where people live. Where the houses are, the wells, the paths.

That is why the Missing Maps project was born on November 7, 2014. It brings together Doctors Without Borders, the British Red Cross, the American Red Cross and the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team, a free map anyone can edit. It launched the same evening in seven countries, including Canada.

The work happens in two steps. All over the world, volunteers trace streets and buildings from satellite images. Then, on site, local people walk the neighbourhoods, printed map in hand, to note the names of streets and places.

In Lubumbashi, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, students from the local university did this fieldwork.

In 2014, the maps helped teams find at-risk communities during the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. In Haiti, MSF maps showed that cholera spikes followed breaks in the water network, which helped win urgent repairs.

By early 2016, Missing Maps already counted more than two million buildings mapped. According to one of its founders, Dale Kunce, that meant 14 million people put on the map.

There is nothing to buy. All you need is a computer, a free account and a little time. A British Red Cross worker, Andrew Braye, summed it up this way:

We often say technology pulls us apart. Here, it links a living room in Montreal to a lane in Lubumbashi. One hour with a mouse can help a team knock on the right door.