Janet Chapman is sitting against a background of plants and soft wood furnishings. A shaft of light has entered through the glass back doors and is illuminating the dust particles hanging in the air. Pre-pandemic, she would have been to Tanzania recently, or would at least be planning a trip soon. Instead, she is sitting in her Hackney kitchen and beginning her eighth hour of Zoom calls for International Women’s Day.
Chapman grew up in the Midlands, spent some time teaching in Sudan and Japan, before settling in Hackney over 30 years ago. After nine years of working for the Tanzania Development Trust, she became chair in October 2020. She founded the crowdsourced mapping project Crowd2Map in 2015, which has so far prevented around 3,000 cases of female genital mutilation (FGM) against Tanzanian girls. It aims to put rural Tanzania on the map by adding schools, hospitals, roads, buildings and villages to OpenStreetMap with the help of Crowd2Map’s 16,000 volunteers – 2,000 of which are on the ground in Tanzania.
Chapman explains: “We have local reps in the areas where we work, one of whom is the FGM survivor and activist Rhobi Samwelly. When we started working with her, we realised that the fact that there were no maps of the area was really problematic for her work. She would get a phone call in the middle of the night saying, ‘This girl is about to be cut in this village’. But where is it? It wasn’t on any map. So, I thought, well, this is a solvable problem.”
Crowd2Map have trained FGM activists and police to use the maps. The project also enables better data collection and analysis of areas in which girls could potentially be at risk of FGM. Furthermore, safe houses have been set up, which are particularly vital for girls during cutting season – considered to be during the school summer holidays when girls have time to undergo and recover from FGM undetected by outsiders.
The coronavirus-enforced break from school between early April and end of June in Tanzania was dangerous for girls at risk of FGM. Chapman said: “Certainly during that time the rate of FGM did go up, and quite a lot of girls didn’t go back to school once they reopened.”
However, the schools were shut for a relatively short amount of time compared to other countries, and Chapman believes the bigger issue could end up being the longer-term economic impact of the pandemic: “FGM is at least partly an economic decision, because families choose to cut their girls to marry them off, and the stark reality is that cut girls get more cows than uncut girls. So, if the economic situation really deteriorates because, for example, there are very few tourists in Tanzania, then that has a knock-on effect.”
While coronavirus has had ramifications for Chapman’s work, she does not seem overly deterred. She hosted an online event for Open Data Day – an annual event that promotes awareness and use of open data – on Saturday, which was themed around the topic of gender equality for the upcoming International Women’s Day. On the day itself, she put on a screening of In The Name Of Your Daughter – a film about Rhobi Samwelly and other Tanzanian girls, some as young as eight, who are campaigning against FGM.
With her background in teaching and ICT, Chapman’s approach is caring yet pragmatic, and solutions oriented. Her activism extends far beyond anti-FGM: “We’re working with women in villages who’ve never been online… We’re training people to use digital tools to report gender-based violence.” She sees practical engagement with these tools as a means of “empowering local communities”, something that will benefit their development in the long-term.
I ask if there is a memorable moment when she felt the impact of the advocacy work that she does alongside Samwelly: “Being invited to the UN General Assembly in New York in 2018 and listening to Rhobi’s testimony as an FGM survivor and having so many people organise satellite events to commemorate – that was pretty amazing and certainly something I never expected to happen.”
Janet Chapman is the chair of Tanzania Development Trust and founder of Crowd2Map Tanzania, that has been mapping rural Tanzania into OpenStreetMap for 5 years for better navigation, community development and to help protect girls from Female Genital Mutilation.
Rhobi Samwelly is an FGM survivor, activist, and director of Hope for Girls and Women Tanzania, that is working with Crowd2Map to train digital champions to map their communities, report gender based violence and track progress towards the SDGs.
