Half of the world population currently resides in cities, with an expected growth of 60% by 2030, according to the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat). Globally over 2 billion people reside in informal settlements, with high tenure insecurity due to fear of eviction. Countries are currently working on improving the conditions of informal settlements through the improvement and integration of informal settlements in the cities.

The Shack Dwellers Federation of Namibia has been using geospatial data for over 20 years and do provide an interesting case on how communities can leverage OpenStreetMap for development. Maps have been a negotiating tool used by communities affiliated with the Slum/Shack Dwellers Federations for over 30 years. The activities of the Shack Dwellers Federation are to form voluntary groups focusing on financial savings to secure affordable land for housing development, community development efforts to ensure settlement upgrading and capacity development. Mapping activities focus on general settlement profiles, where data on informal settlement characteristics are organised in collaboration with community leaders and federation facilitators. The data ignites discussion on settlement depravations such as lack of water, sanitation, and adequate housing. Despite the rigorous data collection efforts, this data is often stored on local drives and only made available on demand through manual data sharing approaches. This way of sharing limits the visibility of settlements and often minimises the efforts of communities in availing data for development.

Namibia has over 235 informal settlements, housing approximately 40% of the urban population. Data on informal settlements have been collected since 1987 by shack dwellers federation saving groups across metropolitan areas in Namibia. This approach is replicated in over 18 countries covering 5000 slums globally. For many federations, data has been collected using manual methods of handheld GPS devices supported by printed aerial images. The data is stored on local disks in the NGO, and most often, sharing of the data is based on demand. OpenStreetMap provides an opportunity for the sharing and improved verification of settlement boundaries, location of services and visualisation of upgrading activities.

Tthe study highlights the challenges of introducing new approaches for communities and the opportunities that exist to scale up. Since the emergence of OSM Namibia, partnerships have been established that could be capitalised to ensure national coverage.

The Namibia OSM project had a high spinoff on capacitating youth with digital skills acquisition and an interest in pursuing studies in spatial sciences. Although there are significant benefits to using OpenStreetMap data, there were observed challenges to including older federation members in digital mapping activities. The Namibia Statistics Agency has shown support for mapping activities. However, the limited integration between the NGO and government has limited the scaling up of project coverage.

The discussion highlights the opportunities for using OSM data for informal settlement upgrading in Namibia. Utilising the expertise of federation members on ground truthing and the skills of youth in digital data collection, the case of OSM Namibia provides a conducive environment for increased updates on the Namibia OSM layer.