Map Kibera — Residents Surveying an Informal Settlement into OpenStreetMap
This overview was generated with AI from the public sources listed below and checked against them before publication. It has not had a complete human fact-check — treat it as a starting point and follow the sources.
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Thirteen residents with GPS handsets surveyed their own neighbourhood in about three weeks; in 2010 it entered OpenStreetMap. The project's own evaluation concedes it cannot tell who uses the maps.
what does this mean?
The strongest source is the operator's or the city's own reporting — an official report, dataset or press release. It grades who did the looking — not how well the project went. All four grades →Part of 1001 Smart Cities — 1,167 documented projects · 🏙️ 4 more in Nairobi · 📊 Open data guide · 📡 Data & IoT projects
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.
📊 Impact
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.
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📎 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.