Crowd2Map Tanzania

About us

Crowd2map is a volunteer open source mapping project mapping rural Tanzania into OpenStreetMap for community development and to help activists protect girls from Female Genital Mutilation. Crowd2map was founded by Janet Chapman, Chair at the Tanzania Development Trust, and Egle Marija Ramanauskaite after they met at the Mozilla Festival 2015 and began exploring ways to make areas of Tanzania more accessible through mapping.

Our work
Crowd2Map Tanzania has been mapping rural Tanzania into OpenStreetMap since October 2015. We have trained over 14,000 remote mappers from all over the world to map from satellite images and over 3000 field mappers to add their local knowledge to these base maps, mostly using the free smartphone app Maps.Me.
We have also set up Youthmapper chapters in 7 different colleges in Tanzania.
Having better maps is vital in the fight against Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) and to help community development. We support many grassroots organisations in rural Tanzania, such as Hope for Girls and Women Tanzania, to use maps and data collection to make themselves more effective.
Crowd2Map Tanzania is an entirely volunteer crowdsourced mapping project putting rural Tanzania on the map. Since 2015, we have been adding schools, hospitals, roads, buildings and villages to OpenStreetMap with the help of volunteers worldwide and on the ground in Tanzania.
We do this so that communities can better navigate, plan their development and progress towards the SDGs, and to help activists better protect girls from FGM.
Having better maps helps community development and means FGM activists and the police can more easily find girls at risk of FGM. Typically they will get a phone call in the middle of the night saying girls are about to be cut in a village. Before we mapped these villages they were very difficult to find, particularly at night, as there are no road signs. Now they can use the downloaded maps on their phone to quickly find locations, offline, using Maps.Me.
Having maps of your community for the first time has multiple benefits. Obviously it helps with navigation, but it also helps with planning. Examples include: By locating the existing water points and houses, we help to identify where the best location for a new one would be; By measuring how far students walk to school we can identify so who should be prioritised for a hostel place.

Janet Chapman is the founder of Crowd2Map Tanzania.

For other net participants we can offer an expert guidance through trained staff, give an expert opinion, procure expert information and establish new contacts in the field of our work.