Finding out how to get from A to B is vital for many daily journeys, whether that’s a parent trying to find a shortcut to their children’s school or a paramedic trying to find a patient in need. Yet, across the Middle East and the Balkans, roads are not well covered on existing maps. In 2019, Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team embarked on an ambitious project with Yer Çizenler, a local Turkish NGO, to map all the roads across the region.

In 2019, the team mapped over 48,000 km of roads in Turkey, as well as adding over 2,000 km of high-quality street-level imagery (taken with dashcams donated by Mapillary). Towards the end of the year, the team even started to expand the project to map the road network into Greece and have mapped over 13,000 km of roads in the country. The project team has a vision to further expand to cover neighboring Middle Eastern countries as well.