Today, I had a good time at the national office and Mapathon center of Unique Mappers Network-the OpenStreetMap Nigeria Community NGO (osm.org/#map=18/4.899962/6.921081) to engage newbies, signing them up and training them on how to contribute to OpenStreetMap. Among them are Ngozi,Fortune,David and Chika (NMak,verified,Peter Msiion D and Victoria Jaja). Please, check out for them to welcome them and share your success stories and motivation for OSM volunteering. Fortune(verifiedfortune) joining Unique Mappers IT cohort 1 for 2025 would be contributing for the next 6 months as part of his IT task.
On 3rd May, We got back to our Map Nigeria Monthly Mapathon to sustain active OSM community participation in Nigeria, especially as we have mapping projects being coordinated in collaboration with TomTom one of Unique Mappers Network partner https://tasks.openstreetmap.us/projects/815#coordination . Volunteers joined from across the states and universities in Nigeria in a virtual coordinated mapathon, especially, the Unique Mappers Team we recently established in Abuja,Kaduna.Ile-Ife and Enugu.
In the first quarter of 2025, we have mobilized,signed-up and trained more than 100 newbies coordinated in a new whatsaap group of the community whatsaap group for orientation purposes. However, mapping contributions has been quite slow as the recent high increase in internet data subscription in Nigeria makes it more difficult for both old and new OSM volunteers to sacrifice the high cost of internet for voluntary mapping in OSM. You can hardly find free internet broad band access to engage volunteers in Mapathon.