Organised Editing/Activities/Climate16 - Anchor Loads for Energy Access

Climate16 — Anchor Loads for Energy Access

An open mapping campaign putting productive-use-of-energy anchor loads onto OpenStreetMap across Sub-Saharan Africa, run with university cohorts and YouthMappers chapters.

This activity is declared under the Organised Editing Guidelines.

Organiser

Climate16, a platform providing data and analysis for climate finance and off-grid electrification in the Global South. Climate16 is operated by Prodegee Pty Ltd, an Australian company, which is the legal entity responsible for this activity — some of our materials and contact addresses carry the Prodegee name for that reason.

• Contact: Marc Torra, Founder — marc@climate16.com
• OSM account: Chakana16
• Campaign repository: https://github.com/climate16/anchor-loads

Questions or concerns about this activity are welcome at the address above, or on this page's discussion tab. We would rather hear from you early than after the fact.

Changeset hashtag

Every edit made under this activity carries #AnchorLoads4EnergyAccess in the changeset comment.

Goal, and why

We are mapping productive-use-of-energy (PUE) anchor loads — the facilities whose electricity demand can anchor the economics of a rural mini-grid: grain and maize mills, cold stores, water pumping stations, health facilities, schools, markets and small agro-processing sites.

Mini-grid feasibility studies in Sub-Saharan Africa are typically built on household surveys. Surveys are expensive, slow, and systematically biased — stated demand has been found to overstate realised consumption by a factor of three or more. Anchor loads are the single most decision-relevant input to those studies and the worst-covered in existing open data; commercial and agro-processing sites in particular are close to absent from most public datasets.

Better open data on where these facilities are makes electrification planning cheaper and more accurate for everyone working in the sector, not only for us. Everything mapped here goes into OpenStreetMap under the Open Database License and is available to the whole community on exactly the same terms as any other contribution.

Timeframe

Start: August 2026. Ongoing and multi-year — successive university cohorts and YouthMappers chapters continue the campaign. See Reporting below.

Participants

• Students of the Master of Analytics programme at RMIT University (Melbourne, Australia), working in three supervised teams during Semester 2 2026.
• Members of African YouthMappers chapters taking part in joint mapathons.

Participation is voluntary and unpaid for chapter members; RMIT students take part as part of a credit-bearing capstone project.

Participating account names will be listed here for those who ask to be identified. Identification is opt-in, and accounts are being registered as the semester begins — this list will be added to as participants join.

Tools and data sources

• Editors: RapiD (primary), iD, and JOSM for advanced users. Only the imagery layers offered by default in these editors under their OSM-use permissions are used for tracing.
• Reference data: publicly available facility registries (schools, health facilities, mills and similar) and open government data, used to inform where to look — never bulk-loaded.
• Preparation: QGIS and Python, to prepare and de-duplicate candidate lists before manual verification.

This is not an import

Every feature is verified and placed by hand in the editor by a mapper. We do not perform automated or bulk uploads from any dataset, and this activity is therefore not an import under the Import Guidelines. Where a public list suggests a facility may exist, a mapper confirms it against imagery and local knowledge before adding it, and adds only tags they can support.

Tags used

Standard tags only; no new or invented tagging. The main ones:

Anchor load	Tag
School	amenity=school
Health centre / clinic	amenity=clinic
Hospital	amenity=hospital
Market (incl. periodic)	amenity=marketplace
Small grain / maize mill	craft=grinding_mill + product=flour
Large agro-processing mill	industrial=grinding_mill
Cold store / ice maker	building=warehouse + warehouse=cold_storage
Powered water pump	man_made=pumping_station
Borehole / well	man_made=water_well
Telecom tower / mast	man_made=communications_tower / man_made=mast
Sawmill / workshop	craft=sawmill
Battery-swap / charging	amenity=charging_station

Mappers are asked to add a name wherever they know it — a named facility is something a planner can identify; an unnamed dot is not. Where a mapper is unsure which tag fits, they are instructed to apply the closest preset and add a fixme=* note rather than invent tagging.

Instructions and training given to participants

All participants work from a public mapping guide covering what to map, the tag scheme, changeset and hashtag conventions, and the requirement that all mapping be manual and verified:

• https://github.com/climate16/anchor-loads/blob/main/mapping-guide.md

Are participants evaluated on metrics?

No. RMIT students are assessed academically on their analysis and reasoning, and not on edit counts, changeset volume, or any other mapping quantity metric. No participant's grade, payment or standing depends on how much they map.

This is deliberate. Quantity targets are how organised editing degrades into low-quality mapping, and we would rather have fewer, better edits.

Quality assurance and validation

Student teams review edits made under the hashtag, including those from chapter mapathons, and give feedback to contributors.

Issues raised by local mappers or by the Data Working Group are addressed by the organiser at the contact above, and we will revert or correct our own edits where the community identifies problems.

Community contact

We are contacting the relevant country and regional OpenStreetMap communities, and the YouthMappers regional ambassadors for the chapters involved, before the first mapathon. This section will be updated with where and when that contact was made.

If you are a local mapper in a country we are working in and would like to be consulted, please get in touch — we would welcome it.

Reporting

We will post a summary of activity and results to this page at the end of each university semester, and on request.