Summary

Equipping young people with digital mapping skills is one of the most direct ways to build community-level climate resilience. HOT is partnering with UNICEF/Yoma and local organizations across Botswana, Lesotho, Eswatini, and South Africa (BLSE) to train and mobilize a minimum of 1,000 youth to collect, contribute, and act on open geospatial data. Through self-paced online courses, field mapping activities, and community-led climate actions, youth earn verifiable credentials that are stored on the YOMA digital platform turning learning and civic action into recognized, portable proof of skills.

Context

Across Botswana, Lesotho, Eswatini, and South Africa (BLSE), communities face increasing climate risks, including flooding, heat stress, water scarcity, and loss of green spaces, particularly in urban and peri-urban areas. However, geospatial data used for planning and response is often incomplete or outdated at the neighborhood level, limiting effective climate action.

Young people, who experience these impacts directly, are usually not engaged in data creation or decision-making, despite their local knowledge and potential. Limited access to digital skills and recognition pathways further constraints participation. This gap weakens climate resilience planning and calls into question mapping as a tool for advocacy, awareness, and community-led climate action.

This project addresses that gap directly. By placing open mapping tools in the hands of youth and connecting their contributions to a recognized digital credentialing system, it builds both the datasets and the people needed for community-led climate action.

Our Approach

The project uses a structured, hybrid engagement model built around 55 youth groups across the five BLSE countries, approximately 10 groups per country, each comprising a group lead and 20 participants targeting a minimum of 1,000 young people with a strong focus on adolescent girls and young women.

Audience

Based in Botswana, Lesotho, South Africa & Eswatini

• Youth-Based Organization
• Focusing on Climate Action
• Mapping & geospatial organizations/groups
• University-based groups,
• OSM Communities
• YouthMappers Chapters
• NGO, Civil Society Organizations
• Organizations working around climate action.

Participants move through an integrated learn-map-act pathway:

• Learn: Two self-paced online courses are developed and hosted on the HOT Learning Centre and integrated into the Yoma digital platform.
  • Course 1 introduces open mapping for climate action
  • Course 2 covers ChatMap for field mapping, including point-of-interest (POI) mapping and community documentation.
• Map: Youth contribute to two mapping workflows.
  • Remote mapping tasks on HOT's Tasking Manager focus on climate-relevant base layers, buildings and roads, and green spaces in priority urban and peri-urban areas.
  • Field POI mapping, conducted via smartphone-based tools ChatMap, captures climate-vulnerable and climate-protective features at the neighborhood level, with geotagged photos and structured attributes. Data is visualized on uMap and shared with country offices and local partners.
• Act: Through mapping for advocacy, awareness, and climate action, youth contributors design and implement locally relevant initiatives. Through field mapping, groups document climate-vulnerable and climate-protective features such as tree cover, parks and open green spaces, building density, wells, boreholes, reservoirs, irrigation systems, forests, wetlands, agricultural land, water storage infrastructure, health facilities, and schools, generating evidence that reflects neighborhood-level priorities and risks.

Each group delivers at least one action linked directly to mapped data, such as drainage improvement, tree planting, or community awareness activities. Contributors use these insights to engage local stakeholders, supporting dialogue and informing planning and resource allocation.

Mapping serves not only as a data creation process, but as a tool for community-led advocacy, increased awareness, and locally driven climate action.

Outcomes

• Youth have verifiable, portable proof of climate and mapping skills they carry beyond the project
• Neighborhood-level climate data exists in communities that were previously unmapped.
• Local groups have planned and executed real climate actions grounded in data they collected themselves.
• Country offices and local partners have visualized, usable data on climate-relevant patterns in priority areas.
• Young people, particularly adolescent girls and young women, are recognized as credible contributors to climate resilience, not just beneficiaries.