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News — 30 June, 2020

Second Round of Rapid Response Micrograntees Announced!

Congratulations to the latest COVID-19 Rapid Response Micrograntees! Their work will make their communities more resilient and help people stay safe.

Congratulations to OSM DRC, OSM Senegal, and Humanitarian Mappers from Nigeria for being awarded Rapid Response Microgrants to support their COVID-19 related mapping activities!

This second cohort of Micrograntees will join the first round of Micrograntees, Map Kibera, Map Uganda, iLab Liberia, and Public Lab Mongolia, to develop maps to support local responses to the coronavirus pandemic. All of these projects have life-spans of 3-6 months and largely include remote mapping activities.

OSM DRC

OSM DRC’s Microgrant will fund the development of a collaborative map that will inform the local community whether establishments are open or closed during lockdown in Kinshasa. The project will contribute to the OpenStreetMap (OSM) basemap by focusing on areas of the city where data is sparse and out of date. The platform will also detail what resources are available within the establishments, such as face masks or disinfectant. Once the basemap is complete, the community will consolidate and integrate the data that has been collected from establishments and visualize their findings on ezosala.org.

Senegal Emergency Health Data Campaign

OpenStreetMap Senegal and Healthsites.io will be mapping 197 hospitals in Senegal and updating data on the emergency health services available at these facilities. The community will compare the open data they collect for OSM with the datasets developed by the KEMRI-Wellcome Research Program in 2018 to enable an in-country analysis of the healthcare facilities available to support the COVID-19 outbreak. With no in-person visits to facilities, mappers will contact doctors at each facility to confirm the scope of services available. The data will then be used by the Senegalese Red Cross.

Humanitarian Mappers:

Humanitarian Mappers will be mapping safe places and quarantine centers in IDP camps as well as isolation centers in Northeastern Nigeria (Borno, Adamawa, Yobe). The project will digitize roads, tag/name features, and provide road attributes by training local community members and ambulance response teams in using OSM and OSM routing tools. The project will work with student volunteers from institutions of higher education in the region, who will conduct remote mapping, and the state COVID-19 Taskforce Team, who are the identified local data users.

HOT would like to offer a big congratulations to everyone who applied for the Rapid Response Microgrant: COVID-19 Program. We had an overwhelming number of applications, all of which were very strong. Although we are no longer accepting applications for rapid response funding, we encourage each and every applicant to continue to apply for our Microgrants.