Unmapped world
The Documentary Podcast
BBC
4.3 • 2.7K Ratings
🗓️ 7 July 2020
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Maps are the scaffolding of the digital age. Without them, and their associated data, a technological revolution is impossible. Vast swathes of Africa are still not mapped to a true local scale. That means governments face huge problems when tackling rapid urbanisation on this fast changing continent – they simply don’t know where people are. It also means that when outbreaks of disease occur, mapping the spread of infections is all but impossible. Katie Prescott travels to Rwanda, to Kigali, which is rapidly changing its layout and erasing signs of the past, to the border with the Democratic Republic of Congo, where the maps just seem to stop, and to Tanzania’s commercial hub of Dar Es Salaam, to hear how community mapping projects run by students are helping to tackle flooding, and outbreaks of cholera.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Combe is all about people and it's all about surprising stories. |
| 0:04.0 | It's all about finding out what's really going on and it's all about Africa. |
| 0:08.0 | It's a brand new podcast from the BBC World Service and you can find it by searching for The Combe, wherever you got this |
| 0:14.5 | podcast. This is Unmaped world on the BBC World Service. |
| 0:27.0 | How many times a day do you look at a map? |
| 0:32.0 | If you're anything like me, it's dozens. In a swipe we can access |
| 0:36.1 | extraordinary detail in cities from Hong Kong to Honolulu. But accurate detailed mapping is far from a given in much of the world. |
| 0:45.0 | Certainly on the commercial maps, it's here there'd be dragons. |
| 0:48.0 | There's still people living their entire lives and dying without ever appearing in any kind of database. |
| 0:54.0 | Their names are only ever known to their neighbors. |
| 0:56.4 | It's not very far from here that you can find people who are just not on the map, |
| 1:01.6 | just for lack of interest. Maps are the building blocks of economic |
| 1:06.4 | development. Without accurate maps it's not just getting from A to B that can be |
| 1:10.5 | difficult the essential tasks of proper planning for housing and infrastructure can be impossible. |
| 1:17.0 | Land is the key to fighting poverty. How can we do that when we don't know where our land is? |
| 1:23.0 | Unless it's enumerated and people get titles, they cannot leverage the value that's in the land. |
| 1:29.0 | I'm Katie Prescott and with producer Sarah Trinor here on the BBC World Service |
| 1:34.8 | we'll be asking why so much of Africa is still not mapped accurately enough |
| 1:39.6 | and how mapping has taken on a new urgency since the coronavirus pandemic. |
| 1:44.4 | A lot of times a lot of these hospitals are not properly mapped and you can't |
| 1:48.6 | reach exactly where they are. We know we have to invest in that. That's the future. |
| 1:54.0 | We'll be in East Africa hearing how community mapping projects have taken off and exploring why |
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