Can we call it a "world map" if it's missing a billion people? | Rebecca Firth

When Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico in 2017,

we all watched as a disaster played out on our screens.

At least 160,000 people were displaced,

and nearly 3,000 people died.

Electricity was cut off to the entire island,

and some neighborhoods didn't get power back for 11 months.

Many of those watching didn't know how to help.

Some donated to international NGOs.

Some lobbied their elected officials.

But as with so many crises,

so many of us simply gave in and felt helpless.

At the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap team,

also known as HOT,

we did something different.

We mobilized 6,000 volunteers across the world

who mapped every home and every road in Puerto Rico.

And here you can see the maps those volunteers made taking shape.

Responders then used those maps to assess the state of buildings and roads

and to provide emergency funds, WiFi and phone-charging points

to people whose homes were damaged.

All crises,

including the COVID-19 pandemic we're living through right now,

have devastating characteristics.

But many of them have one thing in common:

the people hit the hardest are often literally not on the map.

Right now, more than one billion people live in places that are not mapped.

If you look those places up online,

you'll see nothing but a blank.

And that blank isn't just a huge statement of disrespect

to our fellow human beings,

it's an injustice,

causing very direct, very real and very avoidable human suffering.

So what does not being on the digital map actually look like?

I live in Peru, and a few months ago,

some community health workers asked us to help them map.

Obviously, where they were wasn't mapped,

so to get there, we asked a local mayor to draw the route.

This is what he drew.

This piece of paper was hard to follow. (Laughs)

We didn't really know what these lines were.

He put some numbers on there that he assured us were travel times,

but as we were driving along,

these did not correspond to our reality.

But this isn't about me getting lost

or about shaming someone's bad drawing skills.

Think how inefficient it is to manage a team

who need to work in this place

without a map to tell them where they need to go.

Then, once they're in the right village,

how can they collect some data and associate it to that place?

Those community health workers know that needs in this region are high,

particularly anemia and malnutrition among children.

They just don't know where those children are,

or what is causing that problem.

They want to be able to locate the home of every child under five,

but how can they do that without a map?

After a brief training, we went out to make a map,

and this is what those community health workers produced.

This map has everything you need to navigate,

like the rivers and bridges,

but it also has every local landmark, the school, the football pitch, the plaza.

And I'm pleased to say that a few weeks ago,

we got a call from those community health workers,

and they're using this map in their response containing COVID-19.

So you might be thinking:

Why aren't these places on commercial maps?

In short, mapping the most vulnerable places in our world

just hasn't been a priority for for-profit companies,

whose business models typically rely on advertising and data sales.

This leaves out the poorest communities

and means that individual aid organizations create maps

for the small areas that they're working in

in offline systems which rapidly become out-of-date when a project ends.

So what we have here is a lack of easily shareable

and easily updatable data.

But we also have a solution.

We map with a tool called OpenStreetMap,

which was founded in 2006

and is a free, open-source tool which anyone can use to map the world.

Just as anyone can read or edit an article on Wikipedia,

anyone can use or edit the map in OpenStreetMap,

and the resulting map is public good,

free and open for anyone to use,

creating one map for all of us.

It works in two phases.

Buildings and roads might not be on the map yet,

but you can see them clearly in satellite imagery.

Volunteers working anywhere in the world turn satellite images into maps

through drawing the buildings and roads

on top of them.

We call this a base map.

On average, each time a volunteer logs in,

they map an area less than 10 kilometers squared,

but add all those contributions together,

and you can map entire cities in just a couple of days.

And second, local mapping.

People living and working in the places we're mapping

take that base map and color it in,

for example, identifying: Is this building a school or a hospital?

Those people add information you can't see in a satellite image.

We found people able and eager to map

in even the most challenging situations worldwide,

and we've optimized the tools to work on smartphones

costing as little as 30 dollars.

Additionally, the tools work offline,

so people without regular access to cell service can still contribute,

adding things to the map as they go about their daily lives,

and then uploading when they get access to cell service or WiFi.

In 10 years, we've seen people from all walks of life take part.

Refugees have mapped broken water points.

Rural women have added place names in Indigenous languages.

And, in doing so, people become active agents of change

in their communities.

Since 2010, HOT has engaged over 200,000 volunteers

who have mapped an area home to more than 150 million people

in OpenStreetMap.

Those maps have been used by search and rescue operations

to free hundreds of people trapped in collapsed buildings

after the 2010 Haiti earthquake.

They've been used to provide polio vaccinations to children

across all of rural Nigeria.

And they've mapped the camps, routes and new homes

of more than eight million refugees fleeing South Sudan, Syria and Venezuela.

We work with the biggest humanitarian organizations in the world

to make sure these maps have impact --

the Red Cross, Médecins Sans Frontières, UNICEF to name a few --

and we currently have a queue of more than 2,000 places

needing to be mapped.

So that's the story so far.

But wouldn't it be great if these places were on the map

before they were in crisis?

Now we're ready for a step change.

Over the past few years,

we've gained access to global, regularly updated satellite imagery.

Machine learning and AI are helping human mappers

to work more efficiently.

And worldwide, more and more people are willing and able

to map their communities.

Over the next five years,

we'll engage one million volunteers who will map an area

home to the one billion most vulnerable people

across 94 countries.

To achieve this,

we need to do three things.

First, we need to grow our community to one million mappers,

who will build a world where everyone everywhere is represented.

We'll set up a network of regional hubs

to train and support those volunteers

to map the vulnerable places in their own countries.

Second, we need to invest in technology.

Right now, you can add something like a building or a local landmark

to the map in just a few seconds,

but learning to map

and mapping easily and quickly on a mobile

can be a problem.

We need to invest in technologies

to make mobile edits to the map possible at a massive scale.

And third, we need to raise awareness.

Aid projects across the world need to know

that these maps are free and available for them to use

and that they can request maps for the areas that they're working in.

For me, this is one of the most wonderful things about this project.

It isn't really about HOT or any single organization.

It's about creating a foundation

on which so many organizations will thrive.

Whatever we do,

disasters and crises will still happen,

and humanitarians will still respond to them.

Development programs will continue,

but without maps, they'll lack critical information

about what to expect in the community before they get there.

With open, free, up-to-date maps,

those programs will have more impact than they would do otherwise,

leading to a meaningful difference in lives saved or improved.

But it's so much more than that.

It's 2020, and one billion people in our world are not visible.

That's wrong.

This is a tool through which every citizen of Planet Earth

can become known and seen,

to literally be put on the map.

My peers complain about being too overconnected,

so how can it be possible for more than a billion people

to remain invisible?

Luckily, this is a problem even the laziest among us

can help to solve.

If you can swipe left or right,

you can help.

Map this morning

and influence life-changing decisions this afternoon.

Frontline health workers and humanitarians are literally waiting for you.

Thank you.