David Luswata
David is HOT's Regional Partnerships Manager for Eastern and Southern Africa. In this role, he supports the building of partnerships in the region between mapping communities, humanitarian organizations, development partners, academia, local governments, and government agencies to further mapping efforts with the aim of creating and using map data for decision-making. Previously, working with HOT as a Programs Manager, David supported mapping projects in urban and rural settings from a diverse range of use cases such as public health, sustainable cities, disaster preparedness and response, immigration and displacement of people, and government service delivery. His previous work spans locations in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean.
Intervention
The Open Mapping Hub Eastern and Southern Africa, presents insights and learnings from our Open Mapping Grants program in the region. Through this program, local organizations and groups of mappers identified local challenges and designed projects that utilized open mapping processes and tools to address these challenges. In this talk, we will showcase insights in setting up a granting program, and present our learning from funding, and supporting the implementation of 8 projects, across 3 implementation themes in 5 countries across Eastern and Southern Africa.
We will discuss key themes of this granting program such as project selection, community engagement, local knowledge and context awareness, capacity development efforts, collaboration strategies involving diverse stakeholders, data quality and data sharing, and impact evaluation through outcome documentation. The presentation invites participants to leverage these learnings and insights to implement open mapping grants and projects in their own regions, addressing local challenges.