From bus routes to echoing cliffs, tech-savvy youth define Mali’s capital.

In the hot sun of Mali’s capital, Amadou Menta bent down to measure the well and wrote down the results on the map app on his smartphone.

“We’re collecting data,” said the 27-year-old geography student as he and two friends mapped the roadside spills in central Bamako.

Until recently, the capital of Mali was largely unknown on the web.

In the city of nearly two million, street names or fixed public transportation routes disappear, leaving people looking for directions to find their way.

But the lack of maps is a major obstacle to developing infrastructure – whether it’s to prevent traffic jams, to collect waste water and waste, or to prevent flooding.

Tech-savvy young Malians are trying to change this by reshaping the city’s features and improving the lives of its residents.

Armed with smartphones, dozens of volunteers were collecting data for the local branch of OpenStreetMap, a free, online geographic database—which is used by websites including Google Maps.

Mentha and others map the channels that collect sewage and rainwater in Daudabugu’s often-flooded central district.

The flood project is being funded by the World Bank and has been welcomed by the authorities.

But that’s just one of the ways the team is exploring—and there’s more work to do.

“There is no free information in Mali,” founder Nathalie Sidibe previously said.

“We saw mapping as a practical way to contribute to the development of the area,” she said.

“We need to change habits here – and to do that, we need to encourage people to use digital tools.”

Data ‘going forward’

Mobile data access is still poor in Mali.

Nationally, only one in 10 women have access to mobile broadband compared to one in five men, according to a World Bank report last year.

But the OpenStreetMap Mali team has been busy.

So far, her volunteers have mapped Bamako’s public minibus routes, household waste collection points and basic social services.

Deputy Mayor for Sanitation, Adama Konate, said the group’s efforts have helped Bamako.

“Before this project, we only had basic knowledge,” Conate said.

“Now we know this place needs a sewer and that place needs a landfill.”

According to Mahamadou Wadidi, director of the Regional Development Agency in Bamako, youth mapping has made the job much easier.

The agency’s website featured a regularly updated map of all health centers and schools in Bamako, extracted from OpenStreetMap data.

“Instead of taking two months to find out about these things, now mayors can access this information from their computers,” he said.

“Digitisation allows us to move forward, losing less time.”

The impoverished country — which is battling a decade-long jihadist insurgency with severe governance challenges — doesn’t have many resources to digitize information, he said.

But Mentha and his young colleagues have shown that it is possible to start big-map projects “without spending a lot of money,” he said.

© 2022 AFP