Project 1

Community Mapping

In the progress towards realization of the stipulated Sustainable Development Goals and Agenda 2030 on achieving Sustainable cities and communities, resource mapping has gained significant recognition as a pathway towards development. The contemporary agenda is how can a community realize development with their available resources without dependency on external resources and influence. Community mapping therefore becomes a preliminary step to modelling a visual intelligence of resource potentials and bottlenecks confronting a community.
The rural areas have now become endangered environments as they are currently confronted by urbanization, climate change, loss of biodiversity and environmental degradation. They are also worse stricken as they are the source of raw materials for urban areas and host of natural resources such as rivers, forest, mountain ecosystem.
Sensitization of communities about their available resources would enable them to actively participate in making planning decisions pertaining their community. The article 10,118,124,201,221,232 of the Kenyan Constitution 2010 and section & of the County Government Act 2012 advocates for public participation in development activities that affect target communities. How can the community actively participate without prior education of the resources that they possess that they know not? The knowledge about the available schools, health centers, administrative and security posts would save the community in terms of cost and time. It would also significant inform allocation of resources and development in the area. Communities will be able to identify their needs/problems and make impartial decisions to sustain their development growth and progress.
This exercise seeks to support Wang Chien’g administration and community with Participatory Resource Mapping and the preparation of a Community Resource Information System. OSEP seeks to decentralize and educate the mapping outputs to the village level. That through mapping we can bring to life the visual intelligence of diverse resources in endowed in our villages. The community will finally have an instrument that restores their voices, ownership, patriotism and security of resources. The participatory mapping program will ignite community interest in the use of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) to wage war against the vicious waves of climate change, environmental degradation and poor governance. The community resources to be mapped include but not limited to: