User talk:Muindre

OPEN SCHOOLS KENYA-Mathare

Introduction

Open Schools Kenya is a great initiative that seeks to make data about schools available and meaningful to the public and the stakeholders in the education sector through mapping. The idea initially started in Kibera and the rigorous mapping exercise saw slightly over 300 schools mapped in the region. What has followed ever since has been a success story.The mapping of schools has made it easier for parents to make informed choices when sending their children to school. It has also made it easier for the relevant authorities to know about and follow up with schools by contacting them without having to hustle for their contact details like before. The goal of the initiative is to expand to most parts of Nairobi and nationwide. However, in order for this to happen, there is a need to build and foster strong partnerships with several stakeholders in the education sector. This includes the government both the national and County, NGOs and local organizations. In 2016 Map Kibera in partnership with the Youth Mappers program moved to Mathare where they mapped schools in Mathare Valley and uploaded the data to the Open Schools Kenya website. This was done with the help of students from University Of Narobi, one of the university chapters under the Youth Mappers program. Last year Map Kibera and Each Right (a human rights organization that is pushing for quality education for students in Kenya majorly in the informal settlements) met to discuss ways of partnering and with that the subject on information sharing came to be. Each Right, due to the nature of their work, realized that there is a need for geospatial data that will enable them to make informed decisions. Mid this year they conducted a mapping exercise in Mathare, covering the slum area (Mathare valley) and the neighboring area. As a result, based on the mutual relationship that was formed with Map Kibera, they agreed to share the data that they collected so that it can uploaded to OSM and by extension to Open Schools Kenya website by Map Kibera===.

DATA CLEAN UP AND VALIDATION

Since this was data that was shared to us, we had to do some data clean up and validation to make sure it is fit to be uploaded to OSM. This involved:

Step 1-Field verification

Considering that Map Kibera had already mapped Mathare Valley before, there was a need to cross check what was already there verses what had been mapped by Each Right. In some cases there was a discrepancy in terms of the locations, so there was a need to go back into the field to verify the location of these schools using GPS.

Step 2- Fixing the tags

Since the data that was shared didn’t quite match with the format that Map Kibera use, further clean-up was done which involved fixing the column heads so that they match with the right tags that are used on OSM. Below is a document with the correct tags based on the data that was shared to us.

Step 3- Uploading the data to OSM.

After field verification, data clean up and fixing the tags, the data will be converted to Geojson and and upload the schools one by one to OpenStreetMap.