SDGs Today Launches My School Today!

The My School Today! call to action aims to support students and local communities to geo-reference their schools and education facilities as part of an effort to promote timely information on school locations in Africa. To support the call to action, the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network’s SDGs Today is providing an accessible product using open source data to share national population counts within various travel distances and times from recorded educational facilities. Our goal is to engage local students, communities, and other actors in the ongoing development of this dataset, and learn how we can work with education ministries and statistical offices to complement official data sources. We are grateful for the support of Esri, the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT), and UNESCO IIEP, and other organizations in this effort

SDG 4 aims to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education for all, but access remains a major challenge. While enrollment rates continue to increase, other quality barriers remain for many students and learners. Physical distance to educational facilities is one such barrier. A long commute to school can negatively impact the learning outcomes of students, even if they are successfully enrolled. A one-minute increase in walking time can decrease a student's writing proficiency by one percentage point. Such a rate could prove extremely limiting for students in rural areas, particularly those without vehicular transportation.

Our School location data is derived from OpenStreetMap, a powerful open-source data repository of georeferenced buildings, roads, amenities, and other physical features. While OpenStreetMap is vast, data quality varies by region and many schools remain missing across the globe. As a result, SDGs Today does not currently endorse Mapping School Locations as an official or comprehensive depiction of the state of global education access but rather as an example of the potential of open-source data to empower local educational ministries and SDG stakeholders with locally informed data that is free and accessible to all.

Get Involved!

There’s more! The team has prepared material to invite everyone to join the call to action and contribute to the ongoing development of the Mapping School Locations dataset. Below you will find a step-by-step guide on how to map your school in OpenStreetMap, or ArcGIS Survey123--another tool to share the location of your school and let us know you’ve participated in the call to action--and a variety of other resource you can use to help spread the word about the call to action.

Guide:
SDGs Today Step-by-Step Mapping Guide (English)دلیل رسم الخرائط المدرسیةLe guide pas à pas de la cartographie des écolesSDGs Today ArcGIS Survey 123Participation GuideMy School Today! Toolkit
SDGs Today aims to leverage geospatial data to measure and communicate geographic access to educational facilities. Our goal is to support the efforts of local education ministries and organizations in pursuit of inclusive education for all.

We acknowledge that this tool and activity are only accessible to those who have access to the internet and/or a computer. We are interested in working with organizations and donors that can help provide individuals and schools with internet access and devices in order to join the OSM platform. If you or anyone know can help, please contact us at sdgstoday@unsdsn.org. This is a collaborative effort and we would like to ensure everyone, especially local stakeholders, have the opportunity to participate.

A focus on African countries was selected for the first iteration of this dataset due to concerns with extensive gaps within the region’s OSM data, due to low internet coverage and device availability. The incomplete status of the data introduces heavy bias in the estimates provided by this dataset. Thus, the release of this dataset will be featured as a part of My School Today!, a call to action hosted by SDGs Today in order to support localized mapping of educational facilities in Africa.

We look forward to learning about all your #MySchoolToday and #iMappedMySchool experiences. Follow us on Twitter ( @sdgstoday ) or LinkedIn and share your story with us!