The Lesotho Footbridge Project – Transcription

All righty. Howdy, ya’ll. My name is Davey Lovin. I’m a student here at CU Boulder. My project is entitled the Lesotho flip projects. I’m a volunteer for Bridges to Prosperity. And Bridges to Prosper is an organization and group of volunteers that build and design foot bridges for communities in need. They are cut off from access when the rivers flood in the rainy season. Story goes is we build a ton of these foot bridges, suspended foot bridges. It’s a standard design we work with and help the developing communities. We sent students, six to eight of them. We work alongside 20 community members and build the foot bridges with the communities. These are examples of the bridges that our club has built in the last couple years. We have built seven in Bolivia and one in Swaziland as you’ll see. And we can build up on the height of the river and the characteristics and the topography. And the story goes as well is that our chapter, the University of Colorado chapter, has started a new program in Swaziland in southern Africa. We sent a team of people about a year and a half ago to do a survey trip and did a bunch of topographic surveys. And we met with the local ministers and communities to see what they needed. And this is an example of us visiting a broken bridge. We went to the country and met a bunch of officials and started the process of helping them or working with them in order to implement these foot bridges. We are not providing everything. We must have partnerships. That’s our model. So those partnerships, a ton of memorandums of understanding and Skype calls. And we broke ground in the first inaugural bridge in Swaziland. It’s a 73meter bridge. We built the heck out of it. Here is a video of how we work with communities. Story goes is this us putting the rocks that are mined from the hillside nearby into the foundation. And so we use local materials like the rocks that are found and the sand from the site in order to, you know, build these bridges. And what do you know? After it all, we had a bridge. That’s pretty freaking sweet. Next off so basically working in Swaziland, as I said. And I thought to myself, there’s this other country here, Lesotho. That’s a humanitarian OpenStreetMap team. And what’s map Lesotho? Apparently, it’s a superneat project to make it the most bestmapped country in Africa. It is. They do the ID editor. This is a room full of ladies just doing mapping and do mapathons in the country and it’s wicked neat. I sent an email to this guy, yo, bro, maybe ya’ll need bridges. Oh, bra, we need some bridges fo sho. And whoop, whoop, next thing you know, we’re in Lesotho and surveying sites. We’re there with my girls that took us to the sites to visit. That’s pretty frickin’ sweet. I’m going to do spatial analysis. And you can see it’s so Dang, so dense. That’s the border with South Africa. And outside of, there’s not a lot. This is some fertile soil for some dank data analysis. I got the base maps. Word, I’m going to take the centroids of the polygons in the country and run an analysis. So this is an example of the analysis where I take all of those residential areas and I route them to the nearest in this example, it’s towns and then hospitals and schools. These are all the traces to the nearest town. And then this is the darker the dot, the farther away from the towns, as you can see. So then I do an accessibility calculation. Word. We have the distance to hospital, school and sound. And if you’re far away, having a metric of accessibilities. There was a talk on that stuff today too. Which is awesome. And then I changed the color ramp here for ya’ll to see the visual. Then I do a thinplaced blind model, what? I got an interpolated surface over the country. So you can see the surface in its form and overlay the rivers. Sorry, I got to go fast, got a story to tell ya’ll. As you can see, the river down on the left, you can see that the accessibility is pretty cut off by the river. I did extra analysis and wrote Python code. Perpendicular lines for the rivers and sampled it on both sides and found the places with the highest gradient. Some of those there. Word, next step. Word. We’re doing the same thing in Swaziland. I wrote a proposal in Alaska this summer. I cared that much about it. Here we have the introduction. And here, a table of services. Because we work with these incountry partners to put the bridges on. This is what we got to do. And yea. That is it. Story goes, we want to map Lesotho and expand to Uganda and Rwanda and other countries nearby and do more analysis. And if ya’ll got ideas. I just talked a ton about what I had going on. But if you want to weigh in, I’m super about it. Thank you for your time. The people of the kingdom of Lesotho. You can check out the GitHub, I don’t have the documentation. But you can fool with the source code all you want. This is a cute picture of the baby on the lady’s back as we were doing a survey. Thank you, all. This is a supercool conference. I love ya’ll. Peace. [ Applause ]