Bloomberg interns create missing maps, illuminating humanitarian efforts around the world

At offices around the world, Bloomberg interns mapped unmapped places in Honduras, Chad, Burundi, and the Democratic Republic of Congo to assist Doctors Without Borders projects.

Right this minute there are countless humanitarian crises occurring around the world. Whether a sudden natural disaster or the result of prolonged instability, a crisis means people need aid and medical treatment, fast. Regular folks around the world want to help in these moments, but it can be difficult to know how to have a meaningful impact.

That is part of why the Missing Maps project—which started as a partnership between the Human OpenStreetMap Team (HOT), Doctors Without Borders (MSF), the American Red Cross, and the British Red Cross—has taken off. Missing Maps was established to address the critical lack of geographic data in many corners of the world. It also provides a global network of eager volunteers with a way to plug into aid efforts beyond giving money or posting on social media.

As part of Bloomberg’s Intern Day of Service on July 12, Bloomberg interns and employees at offices around the world worked from satellite imagery to trace roads and buildings to assist MSF projects in Honduras, Chad, Burundi, and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

“People would come to us all the time, and they want to get involved in MSF’s work, but unless they’re a doctor or logistics expert we didn’t really know what to offer them besides donating money,” said Elias Primoff, who helps organize Missing Maps events in the U.S. for MSF. “What’s really awesome about events like the Bloomberg mapathon is that they’re very useful for our work and they’re a great way for people to get involved.”

The need for good maps is one thing all humanitarian missions have in common. Without accurate and up-to-date maps, doctors have difficulty finding population centers with patients requiring care, epidemiologists can’t predict where an outbreak might spread next, and logistics workers won’t know how to route supplies. But outside of the industrialized world, good maps are hard to come by, impeding aid efforts.

The maps that Bloomberg interns developed will serve a variety of purposes. Dengue fever currently plagues Honduras after an unusually long rainy season. MSF is aiming to coordinate community prevention efforts to protect especially-vulnerable children in high-risk areas.

The South Kivu province in the DRC has been ravaged by seasonal disease epidemics as a result of prolonged political conflict and large population shifts. With almost no freely-available mapping data, Missing Maps has made South Kivu a priority, with the aim of mapping the entire 25,000-square-mile province.

In Burundi, MSF plans to launch an Indoor Residual Spraying campaign to combat malaria-carrying mosquitoes in the coming weeks. This preventative treatment only works when 80% of area households have been sprayed, so having further clarity on the lay of the land will help them optimize their efforts during this campaign.

MSF isn’t responding to a specific crisis in Chad. Instead, the organization is launching a new maternal and child health program in the district of Moïsalla. New maps will let MSF conduct its initial community survey to understand the current conditions across the district. Bloomberg volunteers helped to map several regions up to 99 percent.

In total, 251 interns and 126 employees volunteered last week. In just a couple of hours, they mapped nearly 41,000 buildings. Offices around the world contributed, including Tokyo, Singapore, Hong Kong, Mumbai, London, São Paulo, New York, and San Francisco.

“The Missing Maps intern project was creative, impactful and meaningful,” said Ken Cooper, Bloomberg’s global head of HR. “It was amazing to see our interns working on such an important project while they were simultaneously connected around the world.

“It was truly Bloomberg at it’s best – demonstrating the importance of global collaboration.”

Each office marked their contributions with a unique hashtag. These hashtags populated the Missing Maps website’s leaderboard for friendly competition among Bloomberg’s global workforce. The London office, which added 10,200 buildings, slightly edged out Singapore, having added 9,000 new buildings to the map.

“Bloomberg interns and employees were drawn to Missing Maps in part because they can quantify their contributions,” said Rebecca Firth, HOT’s Director of Partnerships and Community.

That feeling of working on something greater than the sum of its parts indeed resonated with Bloomberg’s interns. The company’s culture of service is well-established, with more than 12,000 employees volunteering more than 161,000 hours last year. Summer interns not only gain valuable experience by working at Bloomberg, but are also instilled with that same spirit of giving back, both locally and globally.

“It was really great to see so many people across the globe working together to help others,” said Dennis Lysov, a corporate philanthropy intern in the New York office. “It felt empowering to know that the work we were doing as interns will directly affect efforts that save lives.”

The maps created by Missing Maps volunteers help millions of people living in remote and underserved areas across the globe. Before the emergence of the open and shared map data made possible by OpenStreetMap, MSF staff in some cases had to literally lean out of helicopters, notebook in hand, to sketch rudimentary road and settlement maps. Today, through Missing Maps, 18 humanitarian organizations work together to build one central map database, building on and improving each others’ data.

Interns looking to continue meeting urgent mapping needs around the world will stay connected using Missing Maps’ app, MapSwipe. Users tap sections of satellite imagery on their smartphones to identify features like roads and buildings. Those maps then become the “base layers” that participants at future mapathons will use to trace individual buildings and roads into more detailed maps.

“The task is fun yet very meaningful,” said Sik Yin Leung, an intern on the analytics team in Hong Kong. “It made me understand that we could contribute to make a better world, even when we are sitting in front of the computer.”