Gregory Marler fills us in on the latest Humanitarian Mapping afternoon, which took place last Sunday after our celebration of International Sunday.
On Sunday, four of us stayed at The Durham Centre for an hour and a half and mapped over 2,000 buildings around the Volta River, in the Kpong Area of Ghana.
Although not finished yet, this work will help the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre to estimate population numbers in areas that are prone to flooding and extreme weather related issues. Local disaster managers will then be enabled to use funds in the most effective way and direct resources to where people live. We could see very clearly how rough and inaccurate their existing information was when we were doing the mapping: many villages and people would be missed if it was not for this work.
The sections we checked and mapped were less than a third of the area being requested. The small group of Emmanuel mappers will continue working on it from home, along with other helpers around the world.
More details about this particular mapping project can be found here.
Image 1 below shows the orange squares where we mapped. The red dot in image 2 shows where in Ghana we were mapping. Both maps are part of OpenStreetMap.
