Sahel Priorities

Regional priorities

1. Roads
2. Towns

Priority Cities

List of all Sahel cities, with lat long, and before and after shots. If there is no traceable imagery in JOSM, add the city to this wiki and use GeoEye's map catalog to enter information about potential imagery we can access.

• Before and After images should be with mapshot
• After Close ups should be with mapshot and highlighted in inkscape.

Cities with imagery

Name	Traceable from Bing?	Before	After	Ticket	Before Close Up	After Close Up
Bamako, Mali	Yes	Bamako Before	Bamako After	1	Bamako Before	Bamako After
N'Djamena, Chad	Yes	N'Djamena	N'Djamena	5	Kousseri Before	Kousseri After
Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso	Yes	Ouagadougou	Ouagadougou	2	Before-1, Before-2	After-1, After-2
Niamey, Niger	Yes	Niamey	Niamey	4	Before	After
Timbuktu, Mali	Yes	Timbuktu	Timbuktu	3

Cities without imagery

Name	Traceable from Bing?	Before	After	Ticket
Mbera area, Mauritania*	No
Nema, Mauritania	No
Kiffa, Mauritania	No
Tidjikdja, Mauritania	No
Selibaby, Mauritania	No
Gao, Mali	No
Mopti, Mali	No
Kidal, Mali	No
Nara, Mali	No
Djibo, Burkina Faso	No
Gorom-Gorom, Burkina Faso	No
Dori, Burkina Faso	No
Ouahigouya, Burkina Faso	No
Zinder, Niger	No
Diffa, Niger	No
Maradi, Niger	No
Tahoua, Niger	No
Agadez, Niger	No
Abeche, Chad	No
Mongo, Chad	No
Ati, Chad	No

*Somewhere in SE corner of country. From this map

Feedback

Hey. I've started to map Ouagadougou in fall 2008 and have since mapped most of the central parts of the city. Mainly from aerial photos, partly sur place. Together with friends we finance health-related projects in rural Burkina, so I know the city well. As soon as I find the time we will render the city in 300dpi, produce a print map in an appropriate style and give the PDF for free to local copyshops. There's no uptodate and affordable city map.

But that's a different story. What I wanted to comment on is two things:

• Regarding famine risk: The last harvest was a very bad one, so locally produced food becomes scarce. However, that's mainly a rural problem: Famines in the Sahel do not mean that there isn't enough food. Tropical Africa is just a couple of hundred kilometers away, so there is plenty of food. It means that farmers, who live from their own production and sell the surplus, will not have enough food to feed the family - and nothing to sell, so no money to buy food. (It's crazy when UN or the World Food Programme fly in European or American wheat and such. That just destroys local markets. There's enough food just not enough money to buy it.) In cities such as Ouagadougou this is much less of a problem, as most people in the city have some kind of income, and usually not from agriculture. (I'm not saying that increased food prices are easy on them, though. They are a big problem.)

• Nevertheless the mapping you did is of great value. The quarters you mapped are mostly unofficial, illegal suburbs, where people flocking to the city have built adobe huts on land with unclear property situation. As the city grows at a tremendous speed, the authorities often caterpillar such quarters to create new, chessboard-shaped quarters with parcels to sell. Families inhabiting these quarters before - the West would call them "slums" but I don't think that does them justice - are simply chased away. Mapping these quarters gives them visibility. People might start to ask: where is that quarter gone? Especially the donors who paid for the caterpillars.. At least one can only hope that.

So far, my 2 cents. I thought you might find the feedback useful. Great project!

Helge, from Toursprung.com