News

As we near the end of the year, there’s many stories that stand out and define the past year. One that I’d like to highlight here is a positive one - the continuation of the sharp decline of absolute poverty over the past year.One of the factors that’s shown to contribute to raising people’s standards of living, especially for those living on next to nothing, is financial inclusion. And one of the success stories here is the rise of mobile money - at number 5 in the Gates Foundation list of Good News stories for 2015: “Mobile Banking Exceeds Our Optimistic Projections”.The mobile money sector in countries like Uganda is growing at an enormous pace, processing over 500 million transactions in 2015, with many more people using mobile money than a traditional bank account - and these services only came into existence six years ago!With the HOT project on “Mapping Financial Services” in Uganda (more background on the CGAP blog here), we’ll be updating, opening up and increasing access to data on financial services, and specifically mobile money services, for Uganda. With only a short time to go until we start our field survey on January 5th, the project team is working hard to finalize our training curriculum, logistics and mapping process.

HOT Indonesia has been working with Australian Government since March 2011. Initially the pilot project focus on the use of OpenStreetMap (OSM) data as...

The Humanitarian Innovation Fund recently published HOT's latest OpenAerialMap blog post written by Cristiano Giovando: http://www.elrha.org/hif-blog/openaerialmap-final-blog/  

Every year during the rainy season, the largest city in Tanzania, Dar es Salaam, suffers from devastating floods that wipe out roads, destroy houses, and result in deaths, sickness, and millions of dollars worth of damages. By helping communities to map their wards, the Ramani Huria project is able to support disaster prevention and response to areas that were previously off the map, literally. One key element of these maps is drainage systems. We have dedicated mappers working to ensure these, as well as wetland zones and flood-prone areas, are included accurately in our maps.

Inspired by our response to the West Africa Ebola epidemic, a grant was generously made by the Hewlett Foundation to HOT in late 2014. This funding was aimed at improving the ability of HOT to fulfill its large scale and long running Ebola response, as well as have the capacity to respond to future events. It was determined by the community that the grant be divided and focus on three projects, addressing the development of the online tools Field Papers and the Export Tool, as well as building the numbers of Activation Coordinators.

The ward of Tandale was one of the first wards in Dar es Salaam to benefit from community mapping and be comprehensively mapped on OpenStreetMap. Ramani Huria recently spoke to Ward Executive Officer for Tandale Mr. Osiligi Lossai about how they are using the data and maps provided to the ward following the completion of mapping.

The Ramani Huria team was proud to be part of the first Africa Open Data Conference in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. The event drew speakers and attendees from all over the world, to discuss, debate and showcase ‘local and global examples of open data being produced, published, visualized, and captured in creative ways across Africa.’

Web-based mapping is an activity of growing importance in many countries around the world, especially in places where base map data is often scarce...

Mr. Monday Anthony, a 66 year old community member of Mchikichini ward in Ilala District who participated in Community Mapping for Flood Resilience, talked to Mr. Steven Bukulu a Mapping Supervisor and Media Specialist of Ramani Huria about the main reasons for floods occurring in many areas in Dar es Salaam, in particular Mchikichini.

La quatrième conférence annuelle nationale Tanzanienne des sciences, des technologies et de l'innovation s'est déroulée à Dar es Salaam du 17 au 19 juin 2015. La conférence a permis une présentation de la cartographie communautaire Ramani Huria de Dar es Salaam au President de la république de Tanzanie, Jakaya Kikwete.

The "Dar Ramani Huria" Scale Up Workshop took place at Nkrumah Hall, University of Dar es Salaam, on Monday 6th of July. Over the...

Recently we had a very pleasant surprise to be contacted by Nicholas Doiron, who Project Coordinator, Severin Menard, knew from previous work including in Haiti. Nick, now working with Asia Foundation alongside Michelle Chang, knew about the HOT Mapping Ulaanbaatar project and reached out for advice as the Asia Foundation planned an OpenStreetMap Mapathon competition.

  HOT a récemment assisté la société TomTom à l'organisation d'un Mapathon focalisé sur la cartographie du Nepal. Des batiments, des zones résidentielles, des routes,...