2021 has been a challenging year in many ways, but Crowd2map’s amazing volunteers have kept on mapping, for which I am extremely grateful.

Over 1000 new mappers joined us, and added a further 15,700 km of roads, an additional 435,000 buildings and over 3,300 schools. This means almost 17,000 volunteers have added over 5.4 million buildings to date. We continue to give feedback and train new mappers via our Slack channel, which anyone interested is welcome to join.

As we approach the year end here are some of our highlights.

Although opportunities for face to face meetings were few, we continued our twice weekly training sessions via zoom and managed to speak at HOT summit and various other online conferences including SOTM Africa, where Herry Kasunga talked about our Health Centre mapping project

We were delighted that many of the groups we have trained were awarded microgrants from OMDTZ in June, and we are continuing to work with them in mapping areas such as child labour at informal mines, school gardens to improve nutrition, and gender based violence projects.

The Digital Champions programme we started in 2019 in Serengeti has now been extended to the neighbouring districts of Butiama and Tarime. There is a FGM cutting season in progress now in Mara and these activists have been vital in protecting the community and the maps necessary to find girls at risk quickly. Cutters continue to escape across the porous border into Kenya, highlighting the need for better mapping and cooperation.

In November we celebrated our 6th birthday, with an amazing range of speakers, as you can see here. The recording is here.

In December we celebrated the graduation of our first cohort of interns. Eight women from Tanzania and 3 other African countries joined us for a 12 week training session with HOTOSM interns, as part of the Everywhere She Maps Youthmapper project.

So thank you to everyone who has helped us in 2021 and Happy Mapping for 2022 and beyond!..