Crowd2Map Tanzania is a crowdsourced mapping project aiming to put rural Tanzania on the map. Since 2015, we have been adding schools, hospitals, roads, buildings and villages to OpenStreetMap with the help of over 10,000 volunteers worldwide and over 1000 on the ground in Tanzania. We are concentrating first on the areas where girls are at risk of female genital mutilation (FGM). With minimal budget we have so far added over 3 million buildings and mapped over 70,000 sq kilometres. Having better maps helped prevent 2257 girls from being cut during the 2016 “cutting season” and the numbers dying was reduced from 12 to 4.

In September 2018 we were invited to organise a mapathon at UNFPA HQ in New York as part of the United Nations general assembly. This was accompanied by concurrent events in 60 countries to #map2endFGM.

We are currently training all 78 village women and children protection committees in Serengeti District to map their villages to better protect their communities, with HOTOSM in a project called WomenConnect funded by USAID.

In July 2018 we were awarded the Africa award at State of the Map in Milan.We gave a keynote on mapping to help end FGM at FOSS4G in Dar es Salaam, who then donated the remaining conference funding to us, enabling us to buy cheap android phones and train first time smartphone users in Serengeti how to use them to map their communities and report incidents of Gender Based Violence.

In June 2017 we were awarded a microgrant by Humanitarian OpenStreetMap to train community mappers in 8 areas of Tanzania, and presented a community webinar for them. We have also been featured on Al Jazeera, The Guardian and the Missing Maps blog.

We have set up Youthmappers Chapters at the Institute of Rural Development and Planning in Mwanza and Dodoma and spoken at SOTM 2016 and 2017, the HOT summit in 2016 and 2017 and SOTM Africa. We helped organise the first State of the Map Tanzania from 8th - 10th December 2017.

We welcome any help and advice on how best to get rural Tanzania on the map. We are currently mapping here https://tasks.hotosm.org/contribute?difficulty=ALL&organisation=Tanzania%20Development%20Trust#bottom

Thanks Janet Twitter @Crowd2Map @jachapman82
You can also follow our updates at www.crowd2map.org and join our Slack channel at https://join.slack.com/t/crowd2map/shared_invite/zt-dhhcwlkg-ROTlhoST1Rsz9Edhm67hsw