Map Kibera — Residents Surveying an Informal Settlement into OpenStreetMap
In November 2009 thirteen young residents of Kibera — a cluster of informal settlements in Nairobi's Kibra area of roughly 2.5 km² — were trained on GPS handsets by the GroundTruth Initiative and surveyed their own neighbourhood in about three weeks. The survey was imported into OpenStreetMap in January 2010: water points, latrines, clinics, informal schools, pharmacies, refuse sites and security black spots. Map Kibera Trust, run from Kibera, later repeated the method in Mathare and Mukuru and added an SMS reporting site and a video news channel. It is the older sibling of Digital Matatus, and the difference is the object: Digital Matatus mapped a transport network into GTFS from 2012 and was university-led, while this mapped a place, and residents did the surveying. The founding claim that Kibera was blank — absent from Google and OpenStreetMap, treated by the Nairobi City Council as forest — is the project's own framing, widely repeated since; no source was found testing it against Kenyan government survey records. The population is contested too: the 2009 census counted 170,070 people across the eight locations that form Kibera, against circulating estimates ranging from half a million to over a million. The most recent field mapping this desk could confirm is from 2024.
No independent evaluation of outcomes was located. The project's own September 2024 State of the Map talk reports that street-light mapping was followed by new street lights in Kibera, that a December 2023 to January 2024 survey of over 2,000 households and drainage sites in Mukuru kwa Reuben informed where community bins were placed, and that school data led to a pilot solar installation. Participedia's case record, drawing on the project's own literature, adds KSh 37 million secured from the Ministry of Education for Kibera schools and a police post established after crime black spots were mapped; the underlying 2017 Making All Voices Count report could not be opened (IDS repository returned 403) and was in any case written by Erica Hagen, the project's co-founder.
🎓 Lesson
The data sits in OpenStreetMap under the ODbL, which places it above every African government catalogue so far in this atlas for reuse rights — and that same openness is why nobody can say who acts on it. The project's own evaluation concedes it cannot tell who uses the maps, and the recurring academic criticism is that the step from map to intervention is asserted rather than demonstrated. A map anyone may copy is a weaker instrument than a register a department is obliged to consult.
Evidence🏛️ Official
Scale🏘️ District
FundingJumpstart International at launch; UNICEF for the second phase; later donor grants including Making All Voices Count (IDS)
Sources
↗ Map Kibera Trust — About (operator)Fetched OK, 26 Jul 2026. Verifies: launched 2009 by empowering youth residents to create the first digital map of Kibera; model replicated in Mathare and Mukuru; self-description as a citizen mapping, SMS, blogging and video project. Written in the present tense but carries no dates. Caution: the site's /blog/ path and its search-indexed 2024 post URLs both returned 404 on this date, so the operator's own news stream could not be read.
↗ State of the Map 2024, Nairobi — Mapping Kenya: 15 Years of Map Kibera and beyondFetched OK. Conference session, September 2024 — the strongest currency anchor found, and the sentence-level source for the street-light, waste-bin and school-solar outcomes. It is the project's own talk, not an evaluation; the outcomes are self-reported.
↗ Participedia — Map Kibera case recordFetched OK. Source for founding detail (October/November 2009, Hagen and Maron of GroundTruth, Jumpstart International funding, 13 mappers, first map in under a month, UNICEF-funded second phase, Voice of Kibera and Kibera News Network), for the KSh 37 million Ministry of Education and police-post claims, and for the recorded criticisms: limited evidence linking mapping directly to interventions, data legitimacy questioned for the absence of professional stakeholders, privacy risk in documenting an 'illegal' settlement, and unpaid volunteer labour later compensated. The same page states 'over 900,000 residents' — an example of the inflated population figure still circulating in reference works, and not used here.
↗ Pánek and Sobotová (2015), Electronic Journal of Information Systems in Developing Countries — author's summaryAuthor's own summary page, fetched OK; the journal article itself was not fetched. Independent academic comparison of two Nairobi mapping projects: the community-based Map Kibera proved more sustainable than the researcher-led 'Map Kibera Project', which used closed formats and was led by Western researchers. Also the source for the general finding that the more demanding the technology, the less a community can take part. It does not address whether any authority used the data.
↗ Making All Voices Count / IDS — Open mapping from the ground up: learning from Map Kibera (2017)NOT FETCHED — the IDS OpenDocs record and the report PDF both returned 403. Described here from search results only: the most-cited evaluation of the project, written by co-founder Erica Hagen and therefore not independent; it reports changes in donor targeting and local programming, and concedes that because the data is open Map Kibera cannot know who has used it. Treat every figure traced to it as operator-reported until a copy can be opened.
↗ OpenStreetMap Foundation — LicenceFetched OK. Authoritative source for the licence claim: data extracted from OpenStreetMap after September 2012 is under the Open Database License (ODbL) 1.0, with attribution and share-alike; before that, CC BY-SA 2.0. Note that the 2010 Kibera import predates the transition and was described at the time as public-domain data contributed to OSM.
↗ Daily Nation — Myth shattered: Kibera numbers fail to add upNOT FETCHED — returned 403. Cited for the 2009 Kenya Population and Housing Census figure of 170,070 across the eight locations forming Kibera, and for the official statement that informal-settlement populations had long been exaggerated. The 170,070 figure was corroborated across several independent search results, including the peer-reviewed 'Kibera: The Biggest Slum in Africa?' (halshs-00751833), whose full text was also unreachable behind an access-denied wall.
📎 Cite this project
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “Map Kibera — Residents Surveying an Informal Settlement into OpenStreetMap” — Nairobi, Kenya. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/nairobi-map-kibera/ (last verified 2026-07-26). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.
