Commence - Mapping Financial Services Training

The Mapping Financial Inclusion in Uganda project is truly underway as we enter our second week of training in Mbale, Uganda. HOT is currently at the Uganda Christian University (UCU) introducing 30 local students to various open source tools with the assistance of students from Makerere University. There will be two days of training before we head out into the field on Wednesday to start mapping the district of Mbale.

In collaboration with the Financial Sector Deepening (FSD) agency, HOT held a three day training course last week with 14 students from the Makerere University in Kampala covering several topics including OpenStreetMap (OSM), JOSM, OpenMapKit (OMK), OSMTracker and Field Papers. The classroom sessions are combined with field exercises to allow the students to really get to grips with the OMK software, which will be used to collect the financial service providers Points of Interests (POIs).

As a quick recap, the mapping project in Uganda is focused on collecting financial service provider data across Eastern Uganda as part an initiative to increase financial inclusion within the country. This is in connection with the larger Financial Inclusion Insight (FII) program which also includes the countries of Nigeria, Tanzania, Kenya, Indonesia, Pakistan, India and Bangladesh, as well as Uganda...