While studying in America, Tawanda Kanhema was asked to show the location of his mother's home in his native Zimbabwe. But when he went to look for it on a digital map, not only could he not find her house, but his entire birthplace.
Confused, the trained photographer searched again and again on Google Street View and other apps, only to find that many of the places he visited as a child in his native country were also missing.
This realization hit Tavanda hard.
"I see maps as more than how we get from one point to another, they're a form of storytelling," he told the BBC.
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Motivated by a desire to literally put his birthplace on the map, Tawanda spent about $5.000 of his own money to do just that, photographing some of Zimbabwe's most recognizable landscapes.
The missing billions
Digital maps, such as Google Street View, help us locate addresses with ease and enable seamless home deliveries, making life easier for many people around the world.
But billions of people live in towns and villages in developing countries that are not yet fully covered by such commercial operations.
Moreover, the humanitarian charity OpenStreetMap (more on them later) estimates that there are "about two billion people in the world who do not appear on the real map".
If someone isn't on the map, it doesn't just mean they'll miss a delivery from the supermarket - it can, of course, be a matter of life and death.
"If you look for some places on the Internet, you will see that there is nothing but emptiness.
That empty space marks an injustice that causes very direct, very real human suffering that could have been avoided," says Rebecca Firth of OpenStreetMap's Humanitarian team.
Such people are often out of reach when some kind of disaster or incident happens, and the fact that they cannot show exactly where they are on a digital map can make it significantly more difficult to rescue them or try to provide help.
And that's why individuals like Tawanda, in collaboration with big players like Google and charities like OpenStritMep, are working together to help map the more unknown and harder-to-reach areas to create a more inclusive world.
Photographing difficult terrain
To map an area, you need to use a mixture of satellite images and photographs taken in the field.
And so it was Tawanda who took pictures on the ground that practically filled in the gaps, photographing the most prominent points of interest in his hometown.
"Mapping Victoria Falls, on the Zambezi River, was the most complicated," he admits.
To map the region, he had to walk long distances with a camera strapped to his backpack, and drive around in a car equipped with the cameras, and even use drones.
"A lot of our assumptions in controlled production conditions don't work when you're shooting on water," he explains.
"Ships can be unstable, launching a drone from the deck is difficult when everything is moving, it's easy to lose equipment or take the wrong shot."
The biggest part of Tavanda's project took place between 2018 and 2019.
He teamed up with Google, which lent him a 360-degree camera for the two-week mapping trip.
He made at least 480.000 images, which are now available on Google Street View and Google Earth.
But the process of converting photos into digital maps is not easy.
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The mapping challenge
Cartography is the art and science of graphical representation of a geographic area, and how it is made has changed over the years.
The complexity of mapping an area depends on many factors, including how up-to-date government data is - for example, it often does not accurately reflect the true population ratio in informal settlements, and some slums may not even have door numbers or street names.
Creators of commercial digital maps also depend on advertising revenue, which usually means that mapping the poorest areas is not a priority.
You are often directed to local maps that feature prominent rappers such as key bridges.
However, when those rappers are destroyed, in natural disasters such as floods, that reference point disappears, making it difficult for rescuers to do life-or-death work because they can't find anything to tell them exactly where they are.
"When you are someone who does not know the given area, it is difficult to get the geographical location of the area that requires intervention, its distance, number of inhabitants, rivers, houses, etc.
With the help of maps, it is easier for you to visualize and analyze the context quickly and in a timely manner," explains Santiago Luengo from the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent.
And so, to overcome this problem, institutions like the Red Cross and Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) have come together to form the missing maps project OpenStritMep, in order to "map what is unmapped".
How does it work?
OpenStritMep was founded in 2006 and follows the Wikipedia model, so anyone can create, update or edit a map.
The first stage of the process of creating this open source map involves drawing over satellite images and converting them into maps.
Then comes the key element - locals help identify key buildings and rappers that can't be guessed from satellite images.
(This role was played by Tawanda in Zimbabwe when he worked with Google, although the Internet giant's process is different from that of OpenStreetMap).
OpenStritMet claims that because they are free of commercial interests, their process gives more power to locals - meaning the maps are enriched with key information such as water sources, drainage basins and information about local doctors.
“One of the advantages of OpenStritMap is that you can tag a single property with multiple names; local name, official name, cultural name, historical name, different spellings, in different languages. When you include local knowledge, it becomes much more accurate," says OpenStritMap's Firth.
Big targets
The ultimate goal is to obtain a detailed street map that will cover the one billion people living in disaster-prone areas in 94 countries.
To create a reliable map, volunteers are trained to use an application that runs on smartphones and sometimes drones, and state-of-the-art cameras are used to capture the whole picture.
Practical use
This particular project gained momentum after 2010.
In about 10 years, more than 200.000 volunteers from different backgrounds, such as refugees, health workers in rural areas and students, managed to map the areas where 150 million people live.
When communities own and manage maps, it also helps to keep them up to date.
This is vital due to the ever-changing nature of the population in many settlements.
These maps have already proven their reliability in many disaster recovery efforts.
They have also helped provide health assistance, such as key information for the polio vaccination campaign in Nigeria.
Towards the end of last year, 200 students from three Tanzanian universities were trained to map the terrain with the specific aim of gathering information on flood-prone areas in Dar es Salaam.
They collaborated with the local community for two months and collected data on the extent of damage caused during floods.
With the help of cheap tools available on the market, they were able to map the exact locations prone to flooding for the first time.
In Peru, OpenStritMep is being used to deliver oxygen bottles to those who need them, living in sparsely populated areas during the coronavirus pandemic.
Firth says that the data entered by the locals is constantly checked and confirmed.
She says maps are getting better, and aid workers agree.
These maps are also used to compare "before" and "after" situations.
In some cases, the maps were even used to plan the flight path of ambulance helicopters.
Mapping of areas affected by active war conflicts remains a major challenge.
Before mapping begins, an assessment must be made to decide whether a detailed map would help or harm the communities that live there.
Tavanda's desire to map climate change
But for people like Tawanda, being a part of the mapping process is a special feeling, although he admits that the success of open source mapping depends on the participation of communities.
He says his travels while making the maps have helped him better understand how communities, living thousands of kilometers apart, actually have a lot in common, and he wants to use the maps to tell "the biggest story of our time" - climate change.
"I learned a lot about how people in different parts of the world are adapting to environmental changes, and in time I hope to find a way to share those stories and images."
Tavanda's pictures have so far been seen by 30 million people from all over the world. He says that his work gave him real satisfaction and allowed him to connect with people and places.
"These places didn't have Street View coverage before I started that project, so I guess those images help some people to virtually explore the world beyond their borders, especially during these times when travel has become so complicated."
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