in Bamako, mapping the city, a challenge for students

Under a blazing sun, Amadou Menta bends over a sewer pipe to measure it. Objective of this 27-year-old Malian student: “Mapping the gutters of Daoudabougou”, a central district of Bamako. When he has time, Amadou Menta, enrolled in a master’s degree in geography at the university in the capital of Mali, like two friends, criss-crosses the city with a smartphone in hand.

Born in the digital age, they are members of the Malian branch of OpenStreetMap (OSM) and contribute to this collaborative project inspired by Wikipedia launched in 2004 in England to build an online geographic database, free to use.

“We collect data! », summarizes Amadou Menta. This is the watchword of these young bloggers and students with a vocabulary that seems to have been borrowed from Silicon Valley: to make “data mapping”data mapping, to make Bamako a “smart city”a smart city, they plead.

Bamako is still far from it, victim of its dazzling and anarchic growth. Buildings are springing up like mushrooms, the main roads are blocked for several hours “downhill” (end time of daily work) and floods eat away at the roadway when it starts to rain. For lack of street names, maps or fixed routes for public transport, the average person has only their language to find their way.

“Contribute to the development of our territory”

The last census, which dates from 2009, had a “real difficulty in understanding the issues and the dynamics of urban settlement on a fine spatial scale”writes Monique Bertrand, from the Institute for Research and Development (IRD) in her recent book, Bamako, from the city to the agglomeration.

There was before “no free access data in Mali”then “we saw in cartography a means of contributing concretely to the development of our territory”, explains Nathalie Sidibé, in her thirties, the founder of OSM-Mali. Based on calls for projects from international development organizations, Nathalie and some twenty young people from the association choose their mapping theatres.

There was the network of Sotramas (public minibuses), waste disposal areas, basic social services… Several digital tools, including Google Maps, use the data collected by OSM-Mali.

In the district of Daoudabougou, regularly affected by floods, Nathalie and her associates, financially supported by the World Bank, documented the channels that collect wastewater and rainwater on behalf of the municipality.

“We have to change habits”

“We had ba-ba” knowledge before this project, says the deputy mayor in charge of sanitation, Adama Konaté. With these cards, “we no longer have to search. From now on, we know that in such and such a place there is a need for drainage, in such and such a place a need for garbage disposal »he says, smiling and affable.

“The mayors, instead of taking two months to find out about these things, can have this information from their computer”confirms Mahamadou Wadidié, director of the Regional Development Agency (ADR) of Bamako, a public body responsible for assisting communities in their development projects.

M^me Sidibé, the initiator of OSM-Mali, concedes that some of the data collected remains unused. “We have to change habits, we are behind compared to other countries”she underlines, even if a change of mentality is underway.

Mahamadou Wadidié, meanwhile, admits that Mali, a poor country caught in the war for ten years and facing heavy governance challenges, does not have many resources to devote to the digitization of data. But with “these young people, we understood that it is possible” to launch ambitious cartographic projects “without spending a lot of money”he specifies, showing on the ADR website the regularly updated map of all the health centers and schools in Bamako.