By Carter Draper
The Commonwealth district of Grand Cape Mount County like many other settlements across the nine coastal counties of Liberia with low coastal plains and wetlands is hugely impacted by sea rise and flooding. Notably, Robertsports city is among the most impacted cities with high risk, hazard, vulnerability, and
exposure that accompany flooding visually exhibited.
Access to reliable spatial datasets that depicts various aspects of the impact is mostly unavailable making it difficult for key response actors to design data-driven interventions that could address anticipatory action, resilience mechanism, and mitigation approaches across highly affected areas.
The Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team’s Open Mapping Hub for West and Northern Africa is a non-profit organization that supports and works with communities to address issues ranging from disaster and climate resilience, gender equity, public health, sustainable cities, and safe migration among others in the region. The group provides reliable spatial datasets and mapping using Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and other open-source technologies. As a global organization, data collected worldwide is uploaded to the OpenStreetMap platform which is a geospatial repository for open data. The tool and platform are aiding local communities, national governments, and humanitarian organizations to design data-driven programs to mitigate and address development and humanitarian response challenges in their regions.
According to Mr. Carter Draper, Regional Programs Director for the West and Northern Africa hub; in Liberia, they are working with the national government, humanitarian and civil society actors and local communities to generate research data on flooding across the Commonwealth district of Grand Cape Mount County that includes Talla, Robertsport, Upper and Lower Tombey clans. Through its local partners – iLab Liberia and OSM Liberia, the four-month project will conduct focus group discussions, train youth of the district in Remote Mapping and ground-truthing methods, tools, and develop map products. As a sustainable approach, the project will build the capacity of key stakeholders in Montserrado and Grand Cape Mount Counties in Open and Participatory mapping methodologies through the use of open-source tools to enable response actors improve their data collection and spatial analysis capacity. Based on the outcome of this pilot project, there is a potential to scale up to the remaining eight coastal counties in Liberia in the coming year.
The WNA hub is working across 24 countries in the region providing microgrants, capacity-building, partnerships, and collaborating on multinational projects to help address the many challenges faced by local settlements.
As Programs Manager, Mr. Draper and his team are working on Water Access (Niger), Public health (Senegal), Sustainable Cities (Togo), Satellite Imagery for Social Good (Nigeria), Meta Roads (Ghana) and other community microgrants projects. These projects are intended to be replicated across other countries in the region. Our trip to Liberia in addition to the ongoing climate change project is to build more partnerships as we are doing across the region to understand the challenges that could lead to opportunities to support Liberia’s national government and humanitarian organizations in their efforts to improve the livelihood of Liberians
