News — 13 September, 2021

Announcing the Open Mapping Grants for communities and organizations in Eastern and Southern Africa

The Open Mapping Hub Eastern and Southern Africa (ESA) is excited to announce the Open Mapping Grants to meet the hub's strategic aim to contribute to HOT’s goal of mapping an area home to one billion people in areas vulnerable to disasters or experiencing multidimensional poverty across 94 countries; including 22 countries in Eastern and Southern Africa.

The ESA hub aims to support projects and solutions to address map data quality, ethical data collection, and the use of map data, geared to promoting community growth and generating open knowledge and tools.

Types of grants

There are three types of grants available over the next year, these include:

Open Mapping Community Action Grants: These are grants between $10,000-$20,000 which will be awarded to Open Mapping Communities and organizations in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Kenya, Madagascar, Sudan, Zambia, and Zimbabwe to grow local edits on OpenStreetMap while addressing national and/or subnational challenges identified in each country.
Open Mapping Impact Grants: These are large scale grants between $30,000 - $45,000 and will be awarded to consortiums of open mapping communities, organizations, and data users in Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, and Uganda to grow local edit on OpenStreetMap while addressing national and/or subnational challenges identified in each country.
Open Mapping Community Mobilization Grants: These are grants of up to $200 monthly available to Open Mapping Communities and organizations operating in Angola, Burundi, Comoros, eSwatini, Egypt, Lesotho, Mauritius, Rwanda, Somalia, South Sudan, and Tanzania to facilitate community meetups, mapathons or training sessions with partners aimed at increasing skills and knowledge on OpenStreetMap data while supporting growth and validation of remote and local edits on the map.

The grants are available to open mapping organizations, including OpenStreetMap communities, community-based organizations (CBOs), Civil Society organizations (CSOs), and non-profit organizations (NGOs), local/municipal/city governments, social enterprises in the countries listed above.

Priority will be given to projects that address challenges around the following impact areas: Disaster and Climate Resilience, Public Health, Gender Equality, Sustainable Cities and Communities, and Displacement and Safe Migration.

Our Approach

The ESA hub will take on a collaborative approach to grantmaking. We will be holding country-specific dialogues with Open Mapping organizations and communities to understand:

The history and goals of communities and organizations and how we can collaborate
The capacity of communities and organizations to implement projects
The current spectrum of partners, their data needs, and challenges in contributing to and using OpenStreetMap.

We will then work with applicants as they develop proposals that align with both our audacious goals and their priorities and capabilities.