Long queues formed as early as 4am, and while polls were due to open at 6am, some polls were ready, some were not.
#
Traffic at olympic is enormous; 12 long lines all of which have stretched outside the gate with thousands of voters already queuing to vote yet its only 5 am 1 hour to voting time! “We have to vote by all means, this will ensure that we get in the credible leaders we have always wanted to elect.”
#
The turnout of voters at Holy Trinity polling station is great and the queue is moving steadily as everyone awaits a chance to make his/her voice heard as to the leaders to elect. Voters came as early as 4am.
Queues remained long in some places throughout most of the day, due to some malfunction with the Biometric Voter Registration (BKR) kits, and mismatches with backup paper registrations. Also, the complexity of the new voting process (with president, senators, mps, etc etc) caused some confusion and delay.
#
At Dc grounds polling station, voters are being pulled out of the line simply because there names are not in the registers but available in the IEBC system
#
The Situation at Mashimoni squatters is well though the queues are long upto the bridge( around Gogo boys)but is moving slowly and no one is complaining so far.
#
At DC grounds voters who turned out in large numbers,are complaining that given the six Elective positions to vote for,its time consuming and are many.
Kenyans, initially are not used to voting to such positions as provided in the new constitution.
The positions include: The Presidential,The senate,county Representative,the women representative and that for the Member of Parliament.
Many voters have resorted to voting only for one elective position as they check out.
The fire which started at around 9.30am has gutted about 30 houses at the border between Soweto east and Silanga. Property of unknown value has been destroyed.
Residents left the long queues and rushed to rescue their properties.
Map Kibera has distributed election maps in Kibera and Mathare, after months of hard work planning, meeting, surveying, editing, producing, and printing. Here are the maps, linked to larger versions for download/printing if you like.
These maps are in the hands of community networks, peace building organizations, monitors, and security services. This culminated yesterday with Inspector General Kimaiyo receiving a map; essentially the top police officer in the country.
@mapkibera Big audience with all the key security officers in Kenya in Kibera. The Inspector General now has a copy of our map!
The process began almost 6 months ago, with mappers discussing what kind of data should be collected for the election. They settled on constituency and ward boundaries, which had changed following the adoption of the new Constitution, and details on every polling place in the slums. The IEBC had officially made available descriptions and rough, non-geo-referenced images of the new boundaries, and lists of the polling places. Helpful, but since these weren’t released as geospatial data, everything needed surveying by the team. The local IEBC officials were supportive of the mapping process.
(The IEBC inadvertently made some data available, which was scrapable. But it only covered to the constituency level, and almost half of the polling places in the slums were not located at all.)
Beyond the location, mappers collected details on the facility, contact information, numbers of staff, numbers of registered voters, accessibility, and closest services. They produced this form, and these JOSM presets. All of this is stored in OpenStreetMap. It’s not immediately visible on osm.org, but peak behind at the data, for example Lindi Mosque.
The next step, extracting and producing Shapefiles for use in GIS, was the only point where I was substantially involved. Every other step was led by the mappers, who after three years are fully professional in their practice. The shapefiles were produced, and are available for download here and here.
Zack took the lead on map production. We’ve benefited from the support of ESRI East Africa, including Zack’s attendance at the last user conference. He used those skills to produce two maps, then sent to the printer over the past couple weeks, and distributed throughout the community. The reaction has been wonderful.
I was amazed by the work that the team has carried out and by this pioneering idea in slum GIS cartography. Since I teach a so-called ‘netbook class’, a pilot-project in Luxembourg, in which each student uses a netbook as a digital enhancement to conventional classroom activity, Map Kibera, through its webpage and lively blogs, convinced me that it could be an amazing opportunity to provide my students with a hands-on, real-world geography/GIS experience and show them how people could raise national and international awareness.
As we were already covering the issue of sustainable (urban) development in class, my 10th grade students (aged 15-17) expressed great interest in getting involved in Map Kibera and doing research on amenities present in Kibera by using GIS software (QGIS) with the perspective on doing their part in helping the people and community of Kibera and the Map Kibera team.
Awesome! All the data Map Kibera collects is available in OpenStreetMap, and extracts downloadable. So, combined with stories published on Voice of Kibera, Kibera News Network, and other sources on the web, the students were able to use both open data and open source software in their class. Such a collaboration could easily be replicated with other schools … especially right here in Kenya!
Last week, Raoul shared the results.
My students enjoyed doing the work a lot! I am currently evaluating their feedback – seems strikingly positive so far.
They very much liked the fact that they could help out *real* people with an issue connected to the *real* world an not only doing arts for arts’ sake.
All of the student posters, and photographs, can be accessed on dropbox. They are mostly in French; going to look into printing out a couple for the walls of the Map Kibera office.
Next Semester
The class project received positive feedback from all, so is developing further in the next school year. Our suggestion is to focus on other parts of Nairobi, like Mukuru and Mathare, where Map Kibera has initiated new mapping efforts, and where there is much less attention generally than Kibera.
It’s exciting that young people from very different parts of the world, from the slums of Nairobi, and the classrooms of Luxembourg, can collaborate so easily with today’s technology. There is so much opportunity for this to expand, to other classrooms and other cities. Map Kibera welcomes more chances to connect. Hoping the students from Luxemborg join Map Kibera’s Facebook group and make friends with the team here.
Very much worth pointing out that there is no reason at all the collaboration needs to be so distant. It’s likely that these students now know more of the facts about life in Kibera than most Kenyans! Several conversations this week in Nairobi show growing interest in substantial technological engagements in the classroom. Perhaps the curriculum Raoul is developing could be shared and jointly developed with Kenyan classrooms, and lead to connections right here across the country.
