Name: Can we call it a "world map" if it's missing a billion people? | Rebecca Firth
Uploaded: 2020-11-01T18:26:00.000Z
Duration: 8 min 32 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

When Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico in 2017,

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

Basic passive voice

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.

so many of us simply gave in and felt helpless.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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 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,

or about shaming someone's bad drawing skills.

Think how inefficient it is to manage a team

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

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,

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

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,

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.

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.

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 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,

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

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.

People living and working in the places we're mapping

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

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

Subtitles ListPlay Video

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

literally

vulnerable

entire

engage