Since the year 2008 the Christian charity Water is Basic has managed to drill more than 500 water wells all over South Sudan. With their permission, I have imported the coordinates of around 450 of them into OSM. It is my hope that this little contribution can help to relief the suffering of the people of South Sudan in the ongoing civil war. The wells can be identified by the tag “operator=Water is Basic”.

As the OSM Wiki was void with specific tagging guidelines for any East African country, I decided to take that work upon me. I wanted to do a country specific guide for Uganda in the first place. But I soon realized that most of it would most probably apply to other places in East Africa. So here it is: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/East_Africa_Tagging_Guidelines I’d be happy to see lots of you contributing. So if anyone wants to add in more information, please feel free.

When I realised that many airline offices in Uganda’s capital Kampala were missing, I decided to follow up on it and to put all major airlines on the Kampala map.

I now believe to have mapped the offices of every major airline that serves Entebbe International Airport (EBB). In case I missed out on one please let me know.

Within the past two weeks I taught two seminar sessions on OpenStreetMap at Ndejje University. Ndejje University is a small Christian education institution in central Uganda. The students are from different academic backgrounds like civil engineering, renewable energies, land surveying, and others. Most of them had never heard of OSM before.

However, after an introductory class in the first week, we surveyed the two university campuses using different types of GPS devices and entered the data into the OSM database. The map for Ndejje University is now pretty comprehensive. Additionally, the students have pledged to continue contributing for other places in East Africa like Uganda, South Sudan, and others.

The seminar was great fun and I hope it will foster the development of OSM here in Africa as well.