At last week’s workshop in Kwale, we had the good fortune to have 4 folks from Map Kibera with us to train us on GSP and Open Street Map so that we could support youth in 3 districts where we’re working on the south coast of Kenya (Kwale, Kinango, Msambweni) to map their own communities. Jamie Lundine and Primoz Kovacic are Map Kibera staff, and Kevin Otieno and Millicent Achieng are youth who are trained on mapping. See the video above where Kevin and Millicent talk about the experience or watch it at the link here.
Both Kevin and Milli have been working with the Map Kibera staff since October, mapping out different areas in Kibera. For our introduction to Map Kibera, they started us off with a general overview of Voice of Kibera.
Jamie continued on with an overview of GPS and the Map Kibera project.
Primoz gave us the details on using the GPS devices and Open Street Map.
We practiced by mapping out our hotel, and adding it to Open Street Maps.
Then we went to Kinango District to start making the community map there. We met with the District Official and George, the District Youth Officer, explained why we were there. The DO said he’d heard good things about Map Kibera, and he ‘wanted to meet some of those youth mappers’. He welcomed us to move around the community.
The 4 teams did the first piece of the map, and will continue on with it in the future in Kinango but also in Msambweni and Kwale. The maps can then be used for different purposes, such as looking at existing resources and missing resources, or resource allocation, social auditing (eg., the government said that they built something here but it doesn’t seem to exist), tracking and responding to child protection issues, etc.
In addition to that, the arts and media content that youth produce as part of the project will have a much nicer digital map to sit on than what we currently have available… practically no information exists on digital maps about these 3 areas.
Here’s a video about the community mapping. If you can’t access, try the link here.
I had the pleasure of attending a Nairobi party on my last night in town and meeting up with Mikel Maron and Erica Hagen, who make up the rest of the Map Kibera team. I also ate some really bright pink rice…. yum….
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It is brilliant reading you blogg. You really capature the spirit of the week we had in Kwale. Keep it up. Good connections were made and these are going tpo yield results. Just to bring to your attention that last week we were able to have the Map Kibera team come to our Country Management Team meeting to share about thier work and the experience they had with Plan Kwale. It was amazing to see the LTI and most of Kinango were already in the global map. We had also invited our partners, Community Cleaning Services, whom we are doing Urban Community Led Total Sanitation with. There are great opportunities to partner with Map Kibera to map sanitation issues in Mathare. We need to Map where people defecate (sh!t maps), where they place their garbage and many more.
The connections between the Map Kibera and the Mathare team were great and we will explore further how to collaborate.
Keep the good work of documenting and sharing these experiences.
Thanks Sammy! It was a really inspiring week, and it was great to meet you finally.
[…] Youth mappers: from Kibera to Kinango – training peer-to-peer exchange on Wait…What? […]
Wow! This is so nice Nancy.
I am envious you were able to connect with them and go to the workshop! They continue to do amazing work. Thanks for the blog!
Doug
Yes, it was great. They’re collaborating now w/our Kenya program on community total led sanitation and potentially some other stuff, so I’m really excited!
good stuff. They are getting some support for the UN-HABITAT Urban Youth Fund which is great news!
[…] to Diani Beach in Kwale County, where – with my colleague, Jamie Lundine – I co-lead the training of Plan International‘s senior management and staff members and youths from Kwale. An […]