Category: Spatial Collective
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The Power of Community Mapping and Community Data
In June 2016, ten youth from Mathare digitized more than a thousand structures in Kayole Soweto, creating a building footprint of the area. At the same time, twenty community members from Soweto, mapped several hundreds of amenities including hospitals, clinics, pharmacies, schools, security lights, religious institutions, bars, government offices, etc. In just one week, under…
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Community Land Mapping – Post Fieldwork Data Management and Map Creation
The final step in community land mapping in Tana River County was to design the maps of the two targeted communities. Previous steps are described here, here and here. To complete the two maps we used data collected from the field, including GPS files of points and tracks, two drawings made by community members of their community…
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Field work in Tana River
After the initial three day hands-on training and a community forum, it was time to hit the field. As noted in the previous blog posts (here and here), the targeted communities were Chana and Handaraku in Tana River County. We had very little knowledge of the area prior to going to the field, so we…
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Start of Community Land Mapping in Tana River: Forum
This is a follow up on the previous post. We began our field work on mapping community land by holding a large forum with the representatives of Chana and Handaraku communities, the two communities in Tana River County targeted in this mapping exercise. Community Land Rights Mobilizers and other selected community representatives were invited to participate…
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Mapping Community Land in Tana River
We are currently in Tana River supporting the work of Kenya Land Alliance (KLA) and their partners Namati and Oxfam in using mapping and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) tools in their efforts to help communities protect their customary and indigenous land. We are building on the work that these organizations have already completed in Tana…
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PopTech Talk
I was recently honored by being selected as a 2015 PopTech Social-Innovation Fellow. I had the pleasure to participate in a week long training program with eight other amazing fellows, organized on the beautiful island of North Haven, in Maine. The training program was led by a variety of astonishing faculty and it consisted of…
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Documenting potential impact of development projects on communities in Lamu County
The “World is coming,” said the deputy secretary of Kililana Farmers Association during our LAPSSET conflict risk mapping exercise in old Lamu Town on Kenya’s coast. The secretary was referring to the massive infrastructural development project which will traverse most of northern Kenya. It is called the Lamu Port South Sudan Ethiopia Transport (LAPSSET) corridor.…
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Geography of Service Delivery
Nairobi’s population has increased more than tenfold in the last 50 years.[1] This rapid urbanization brought with it a two-tier development process where some areas are rapidly modernizing while others lag behind. The provision of basic services often follows the split. Different geographic areas of Nairobi enjoy different levels of development and access to public…
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Rethinking waste management in Nairobi’s informal settlements
Community-based organizations are in the forefront of dealing with waste management in Nairobi’s informal settlements, however, their interventions often fall short of becoming sustainable and profitable on the long run. Research shows that there is ample opportunity in alternative material recovery, recycling, and sorting of trash in the informal settlements, as well as, in establishing…
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Mathare Demographic
This post was cross-posted from Spatial Collective’s blog. Informal settlements are often missing from geographic and statistical representation of their countries, and Nairobi’s informal settlements are no exception. With so few household surveys, high-quality data with specific focus on informal settlements are very hard to come by. For this reason, little information is available on…