GW Geography Department Hosts Mapathon for USAID

The GW Department of Geography joined with the U.S. Agency for International Development for a Mapathon session during which students used open source software to map communities in Mozambique to support an Obama Administration anti-Malaria campaign.

When it was launched in 2005, the goal of what has come to be known as the President’s Malaria Initiative was to reduce malaria-related mortality by 50 percent across 15 high-burden countries in sub-Saharan Africa.

The event on March 25 was the seventh Mapathon at George Washington University in conjunction with the USAID. More than 15 Mapathons have been convened in total, some with other partners such as the American Red Cross and the Peace Corps. Nuala Cowan, an assistant professor in the Department of Geography, and Richard Hinton, manager of the Spatial Analysis Lab, serve as faculty leads on the collaboration with USAID.

The event is part of an ongoing worldwide initiative to map the most vulnerable places in the developing world so that international and local NGOs and individuals can use maps and data to better respond to crises affecting vulnerable areas. The maps created exist in the common space and can be used without legal barriers.