Integrated Deprived Area Mapping System (IDEAMAPS) Network

Introduction:

The UN estimates that 2.5 billion people will be added to the planet over the next 30 years. A large portion of these populations will reside in deprived neighbourhoods including slums, informal settlements, and areas of inadequate housing and face a range of challenges from insecure tenure, to unplanned housing, pollution, environmental risk, and social exclusion. Spatial data on such neighbourhoods are commonly not available. On the occasions that they do exist, they quickly become out-dated. Without up-to-date information on the geography (location and extent) of deprived neighbourhoods and the specific social and physical environmental conditions faced by their inhabitants, the impact of these on health and social outcomes are not traceable and the development of effective interventions is not achievable. However, there is currently no systematic, scalable approach to map deprived neighbourhoods across cities, particularly in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs).


Methodology:

The project will design an Integrated Deprived Area Mapping System (IDEAMAPS) that will push the boundaries and overcome the weaknesses of each of these current approaches to mapping slums, informal settlements, and areas of inadequate housing. This will be accomplished by joining up a multisectoral and transdisciplinary network of researchers, technologists and societal stakeholders who will collaborate to co-design the IDEAMAPS approach to map and address neighbourhood deprivation and perform pilot studies in Nairobi, Accra, and Lagos, where we have existing strong partnerships and access to existing data (see details below). This approach will consist of an innovative combination of three components: (a) engagement of stakeholders in different scales; (b) modelling and data infrastructure techniques that aim to integrate and leverage the accuracy of field-based maps; (c) an integrative framework, which defines assessment criteria for characterising neighbourhood deprivation in connection with sustainable development.

Work Groups:

WP1. Stakeholder Engagement- This work package (WP) leads engagement of stakeholders across sectors (e.g. EO, demography, community, policy) in both established and innovative ways to further develop understanding of urban neighbourhood deprivation, and to create enabling environments in which a deprived area mapping system can be implemented.

WP2. Integrative Frameworks- This will be dedicated to the synthesis of key requirements and a shared agenda for the IDEAMAPS approach. It will begin with collating existing literature reviews from current and past projects of the research team: specifically, the Improving Health in Slums Collaborative, Surveys for Urban Equity, Million Neighborhoods Initiative, Modelling African Urban Population Patterns, Accra women's health study, and Standardizing City-Level Data-Gathering in Lagos and Accra.

WP3. Modelling and Data Infrastructure Techniques. This WP3 collate existing data and methods to test potential IDEAMAPS approaches. Based on the domains of deprivation framework developed in WP 2 with input from stakeholders of WP1, we will develop new area-level environmental (e.g. flood risk) and social datasets (e.g. open sewers), and evaluate modelling approaches that can capture domains of deprivation individually, as well as an overall deprivation "slumness" index. WP2 will also investigate different visualisation targeted at end-users in different scales. The evaluation criteria developed in WP 2 will be used to assess and compare model outputs.

Expected Output:

The work packages will create a foundation of stakeholder engagement approaches, frameworks, and techniques to scale-up over the next three years to flesh out an integrated deprivation area mapping system (IDEAMAPS) with a capacity to generate more accurate and usable maps and integrate them into community upgrading and advancing progress toward sustainable development goal.

The expected long-term impact of this outcome is a contribution towards the targets of: ensuring access for all adequate, safe, and affordable housing (SDG 11.1); achieving adequate and equitable sanitation and hygiene for all (SDG 6.2); and reduction in the number of deaths and people affected by disasters, including water related disasters (SDG 1.5).
This proposal will benefit capital city authorities, community organisations, and research teams in Kenya (Nairobi), Ghana (Accra), and Nigeria (Lagos) with decision-critical maps of neighbourhood-level deprivation, flood risk, and open sewer locations. By engaging with stakeholder groups directly and via networking events, various local authority departments, community organizations, and research teams will help to define a shared framework and technical process by which these data can be mapped routinely and accurately. We expect that our engagement process will facilitate new channels of communication and collaboration within and across the three cities that could sustain further upgrading and development projects beyond the life of the project

-Community Impact-local communities vulnerable to poor sanitation infrastructure, flooding, and other environmental and social risks will benefit directly from the community engagement methods (WP1) that will bring together people from different sectors as well as age, gender and socioeconomic groups. These methods will not only produce data for the project and build awareness, but will also enhance capacity of citizens of our study areas and of the partner organisations (see Letters of Support from SDI-Kenya, SDI-Ghana, SDI-Nigeria, Pamjua Trust, Map Kibera) to develop community-based initiatives that combine risk reduction and local development to improve resilience.

-Local and national governmental impact: (a) improved communication channels between community groups and local government agencies to convey community needs and priorities, as well as to notify vulnerable communities of outside threats; (b) improved risk mapping by incorporating community-driven data related to physical and social vulnerability from WP 1; (c) long-term development of more precise flood risk and planned sanitation infrastructure installation and upgrading. With the direct involvement of researchers from the Kenyan, Ghanan, and Nigerian academic partners with non-academic cooperation partners, the project will also build research capacity with the interdisciplinary research methods developed in the project, which will be used in further initiatives in different parts of Africa.

-National/international community impact: Disseminating the project datasets, code, and findings through open-source platforms (see Letter of Support from UN Global Data Platform, Gates Foundation, EC Joint Research Centre), the project will ensure wider long-term impact across LMICs (WP 3). The larger "slum" mapping community event will target policy makers, governmental agencies and local governments involved in city planning, slum upgrading, disaster risk reduction and SDG progress monitoring in Africa and other LMICs, beyond those directly involved in the project (WP 1) (see Letters of Support from UN-Habitat, SLUMAP, ARISE, European Space Agency, South African Space Agency). The literature reviews (WP2), stakeholder engagement framework (WP1), Domains of Deprivation framework (WP2), and deprivation mapping assessment criteria (WP2) shred via paper and policy briefings will offer a set of evidence-based recommendations and best practices that can be used by communities, governments and research institutions in LMICs to scale-up deprivation area mapping.

-Business communities impact: Engaging with technology companies in each location and in the international community involved in the provision of data services, the project will seek to identify what role the private sector can play in for the sustainability plan of the second phase of the IDEAMAPS network.