Recent disaster trends indicate that people are increasingly impacted by more frequent and severe disasters particularly in vulnerable communities around the world. Rapid urbanization, overcrowding, poorly built dwellings and insufficient infrastructure has left hundreds of millions of people increasingly vulnerable to disaster and disease. The Missing Maps project aims to put these communities on the map.

The Missing Maps Project is a collaboration between the American Red Cross, British Red Cross, Médecins Sans Frontières UK and the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team to map the world’s most vulnerable communities. The project was launched in November 2014 with multiple mapathons and has since had over 41 mapathons hosted in 11 countries.

Our recent focus has been introducing technologies like OpenMapKit to to encourage and empower communities to map their environments and take action themselves. This talk shares case studies of the mapping process including community mapping and the lessons learned for various projects in the past year. This includes Response to Ebola in West Africa, response to Tropical Cyclone Pam in Vanuatu, and community mapping in Zimbabwe, Tanzania and Rwanda.