My name is Yala Borova and I'm a community engagement and communication coordinator with the Doctors Without Borders or our international name is Les Sans Sans Frontières and I have worked for the Prague office of MSF for about two years and a half on the

Missing Maps project. The Missing Maps project is an initiative of about 20 organizations, so ours is just one of them, to map in the areas of the world that are prone to disaster

where vulnerable communities live. So I work on this project globally in order to support our communications and to engage with many communities in the countries where MSF has offices in collaborative mapping. The humanitarian challenges that we respond are many. The natural disasters in the last year have been for example the floods in South Sudan,

the cyclones on the Mozambique coast and they have affected Madagascar as well. Madagascar has suffered an unprecedented drought that has led to malnutrition and then of course disease outbreaks or even neglected diseases that people in Europe don't know much

about like Noma which is a facial infection. In all these contexts we have supportive operations with crowdsource mapping through Missing Maps and it helps to create basemaps as well as maps for concrete activities, for planning activities, for analysis that allows

us to make the activities more targeted to where people live or to where they need the help the most because we can overlay the data like for example water sources so then we can bring water where there are none or plant food distribution where there are clusters of people

living there. In terms of the collaborative mapping the challenge has been validating the data because we're good at importing people but a lot of them are new mappers so they digitize in OpenStreetMap for the first time and sometimes they don't map all the buildings or

they do not complete the data correctly they do not square them or they might have joint nodes and so that's why we need another pair of eyes to have a look at that and check the data and correct it and we have many more mappers than validators we have a couple of dozens of loyal

validators who do really the bulk of the work so that's part of the community engagement in them to help us on the projects that are urgent it's worked out well and I've gotten to know a number of them almost personally over the years we write each other messages and so on

and then with that goes the data quality so sometimes the images are not giving up in order to have well digitized data or the data has to be post-processed so that it has sufficient quality that's why we have GIS people on the ground who then prepare the data for the

use and create our products. It's interesting to look at where we map with the missing maps if you look at it globally missing maps projects are in a number of continents of course London America included Asia but as well in Europe in terms of MSF they are of course

where our operations are and we currently have operations in more than 70 countries and the missing maps activations meaning when we decide to go ahead and create mapping projects and involve volunteers in the mapping have been based on the requests from the field so not for all our operations we would not have resources to run that

but they have been for about 12 contexts this year we have finished already six campaigns I think and a couple of urgent projects that are done in a matter of days and they're for smaller areas like recently Bongo district in Chad for a measles vaccination

survey and majority of those countries are around equatorial Africa the democratic republic of Congo the central african republic we've had mapping in Burundi for individual spreading

against mosquitoes carrying malaria and we've had Madagascar and Mozambique we do have mapping with missing maps also in some of the middle eastern countries and in South America we've had for example Venezuela and Honduras so it's not something

Africa specific but majority of the mapping is in Africa and the rural areas where the available maps are just not detailed enough all the data that we map are mapped in the open street map so as such they are available for updating afterwards and also obviously for use by other

organizations and this past year we have met in the south of Madagascar since March when we start an assessment of the needs of the ground and the first small team of my colleagues found that there was severe acute malnutrition so we started mapping in the districts of Anorsay

and Ambosari and we met up to date over 320 000 buildings and I would say over 1500 villages in those rural areas most of the saddle points were not on the map at all

because there is literally no commercial interest for maps like google and also many roads were missing so some of our teams also take gb extracts when they go to the field and then it can be used for navigation and in some cases it is uploaded to the open street map and I know that in that

context it was used initially for creating more detailed maps and for being able to orient where to conduct the field visits in order to assess the needs more in detail for example measure the malnutrition with the bracelets or by weighing the children

and then for planning the activities some of the OSIN data has been used also in the dashboard monitoring how the situation is evolving that includes other data including our internal tracking of the patients and so on and lately our water and sanitation team has used it in

order to see where people live the density of the population if there are water sources because part of the malnutrition crisis is also that they just don't have potable clean water and they cannot have a proper harvest because of this ongoing drought so then they decided

where they will go and how they will get there. In also assessing the situation with regard to natural disasters, Maragaska has been hit also by the cyclones recently in Batsirai and

so we tested using map spike which is a mobile app for change detection it's a new function so you can swipe on your mobile phone and in this case it was used to show where there was flooding and also to have damage. The data tools that we use for the missing maps are

map swipe for pre-mapping narrowing down large areas to those where people live and in those areas we then create mapping projects where it's digitized at the building level on the hot tasking manager which is maintained by the humanitarian open street map team

it has the ID editor integrated which is used directly for making changes in the open street map including chainsaw comments and adding hashtags and we use also other editors like for example JOSM which is even more efficient it has advanced functions, tested plugins

and also maprolets or wrap ID and some of the other open data tools that are just available you can download it to your computer are for example QGIS for checking the state of open street map before we launch a project so sometimes it's enough to just give assessment

sometimes it's another actor within the missing out sphere who is already mapping there to give you an example that was a volcano eruption in the democratic republic of Congo, Grosugoma and our colleagues wanted mapping on the escape routes and the OSM-RDS local

OSM community was already mapping it so we could let them know that it's getting updated and we also use some of the other tools for mobile data collection for example the cobalt toolbox as an active conflict context is obviously a sensitive place

for mapping and sharing spatial information there has been interest from the community they can help by mapping as it's one of the concrete ways other than giving something and we have taken the approach of first listening to the OSM community there

and some of the members of OSM Ukraine have expressed wish not to map Ukraine and of course we respect it in that sense there has been a statement put out by the human

team on their website on the ethics of mapping in conflict and this is quite in line with the MSF approach that mapping in conflict involves of course weighing the risks and you do not want to cause any harm or mean major risk to the community which is where you're

and enjoy the safety of your teams as well as their access so that means sometimes that the decision must be taken not to any mapping or not to share the data publicly or not to do

public mapping we haven't done any mapping with MSF in Ukraine through missing maps always interested in what they can do so i i want to think of them and of course people can join the market that we're organizing nowadays a lot of them are still online or hybrid

they can be checked on missingmaps.org events the public ones get registered there and feel free to add mathons there if you're an institution that does them and if you want to partner up with any of the missing maps member organizations then don't hesitate to contact and get involved because it's a collaborative crowd sourced platform for doing great projects

together so it's very much open to initiatives from different actors and for individual involvement