No10, Thayu, Mabatini & Mashimoni – A pilot within a pilot
Our biggest focus during this pilot project in Mathare was on four villages: Mathare No10, Thayu, Mabatini, and Mashimoni. This is because our local partner (Community Cleaning Services) operates in the area and also because we wanted to test our capacity – figuring out how much can be done in the limited amount of time. [...]
Second phase of Water and Sanitation Mapping – Intermediary analysis
The second phase of Water and Sanitation mapping is over and with it the pilot in Mathare, which lasted for 4 months. You can read all about the events and the processes leading up to this point on our previous blog entries. I will call this an intermediary analysis because the work is by no [...]
Why Map Open Drainage? And How?
I believe that the reasons to map open drainage in the slums are well known and are obvious to most people. Everyone who’s ever been to the slums knows that open drainage presents a huge health hazard to the people living around it. In combination with poor or non-existent water and sanitation systems, open drainage [...]
First phase of water and sanitation mapping
The first phase of detailed water and sanitation data collection and editing is over. In two weeks our teams collected and edited 262 points including: 89 points with toilets, 108 water points and 65 open defecation areas. What we learned from the numbers: The smaller number of toilets does not show the real picture as [...]
How to map open defecation areas
Our teams have started with comprehensive thematic mapping of Water and Sanitation. Most of the things that we set out to map, such as water points and toilets, were pretty straightforward, but there were also some unknowns – like open defecation areas. What is an open defecation area (ODA)? This is an area which is [...]
Nightly Built in front of our noses
When talking about cities that ‘emerge at night’. Here is an example of the buildings being constructed in front of our noses. It took them less than a week to put up a housing unit (tin shack) which contains 8 rooms and will house – if we downsize the number of people to at least [...]
Update on video in Mathare (and Kibera)
This is a fairly short and quick update on video in Mathare and even shorter in Kibera. One of our ideas at the beginning of the video program in Mathare was that video guys would go on the field with mappers and collect what they are doing. We thought this would be important for several [...]
7% of Mathare has been ground truthed
We have completed the ground truthing of a test area of Mathare 10, Mashimoni, Mabatini and Thayu. The whole exercise took us two days. It took us one day to prepare – determine how to go about it, go out in the field to see how it works, what needs improving and to create proper [...]
Ground Truthing Mathare
The American Association for Advancement of Science (AAAS) donated us a WorldView-2 image (read more) with 6% cloud cover, taken on 30th of June 2010. It covers the areas of Mathare Valley, Korogocho, Kariobangi, Baba Dogo, as well as part of Kasarani, Dandora, and some surrounding areas. Altogether, the imagery is of a broader eastern [...]
Base map of Mathare is complete!
We’ve completed the base map of Mathare. It took us 17 days during which 15 mappers (on average each day) would map and edit for an average of 5 hours per day. That accumulates up to 1250 man hours. Of course the exact figure of man hours is much lower mainly due to a limited [...]
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