Our club, the University of Colorado Boulder chapter of the non-profit Bridges to Prosperity (B2P), has started a footbridge building program in Swaziland, southern Africa and helped build our inaugural bridge there this past month.
During the course of our build, we contacted members of the OSM #MapLesotho initiative and travelled to Lesotho with members of the community surveying bridge sites in the country. In our trip we built a strong group of interested parties and are well on our way to organizing a build in Lesotho for next summer.
Furthermore, with the wealth of OSM data available due to #MapLesotho I performed a spatial analysis with python and R to identify regions of the country that are cut off from accessibility to essential services by rivers–places that would be ideal for a footbridge!
Finally, I have begun to sprout the idea of creating a collaborative online map so that the #MapLesotho community of district planners can identify sites that need a footbridge which is a huge step towards bringing aid to these sites.
In my talk I would love to speak about the breadth of my project or go into depth about one or more facets! Thank you!
