Mapping mathare Mapping mathare

Map mathare began in the year 2010 December with more one hundred and fifty participants allover mathare the group were subdivided into three mapping team, new media team and video team ,the map training was being offered by young youths from kibera how had already been trained on to use digital tools by ground truth initiative a US based LLC ,on how to highlight issues affecting their community even help other improve their geographic information of where they are coming from, the training exercise took three weeks, in which mathare community had first to be trained on to use mapping tools these included open street map platforms, bable software’s, arch GIS software and for video was how to use flip cameras, edit video using adobe movie maker ,windows movie maker and later upload them to YouTube and for the blog was how to write stories and later upload them to word press blog.

With assistance from community cleaning service (CCS) we were able to come with a mapping questioner which truly helped us in collecting data relating water and sanitation of entire mathare in the questioner several issues were put into consideration like type of toilets to mapped ,water points , open drainages ,open defecations, etc during the mapping exercise several issues emerged like fear from the community that the mappers were government spy’s who were out collect information on illegal water connections and threats from gangs who were intending to steal mapping  equipments from the mappers. 

After three weeks of training the mapping exercise started all over mathare were the youth had to collect basic data like road, hotels, school, health facilities, hotspot areas and water points and dump sites this took two months in which the maps were produce and later a big community forum was called at mathare polytechnic, more than one hundred and fifty people participated during the exercise maps were presented, video were played and stories from matharevalley blog were read to the community. Later discussion regarding the mapping exercise which several issues emerged some of them were  taken into considerations like the community were concerned more about water and sanitation, health ,security, education here in mathare. With funds from plan international Kenya were able to do a detailed water and sanitation map of entire.

Joshua Mwema one of the mappers with map mathare say that mapping is very important thing since one will be in a position to understand and tell better what happening to is community he even thanks and kibera trust for the training they offered him since he didn’t not have any skills of mapping, video editing and even how to use a computer as for now he have them all for free.

The major fear facing Mapmathare is that mapping it’s a very expensive process which requires a lot of money without constant funding from big origination one can do mapping alone since it requires help from local community to help you collect the data and another thing is that all mapping exercise require expertise which may in turn to be very expensive to an organization, another thing is competition from big organization like Google ,another threat there is slow response from the government and ignorance to understand the importance of emerging tools which can truly help in terms of highlighting problems facing community .

For more information visit www.mapmathare.org