OCHA offers its location maps on Wikipedia

An updated collection of more than 200 free country-location maps, created by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), can now be downloaded from ReliefWeb and Wikimedia commons. In addition, some maps are also featured on Wikipedia country pages. The project’s goal is to give the humanitarian community and the public free access to accurate, attractive maps.

OCHA’s key activities include information management and producing geographical visualization to support the coordination of humanitarian partners during the response to an emergency or natural disaster anywhere in the world. OCHA location maps were originally created to be embedded into a report or a website, offering essential information, such as main cities and neighbouring countries, using a sleek and effective design.

"OCHA is pleased to share the maps openly and publicly," said Gwi-Yeop Son, Director of OCHA's Corporate Programmes Division. "Through this new joint initiative, OCHA can now give Wikipedia's 22 million readers the ability to reuse those maps as they see fit.” This is thanks to the community of volunteers who dedicate time and energy to write, edit and check entries to ensure information is current and relevant.

Since OCHA first created the location maps, it has made a series of improvements, such as design updates and new territories. Thanks to Wikimedia NYC volunteers' work, OCHA’s maps can now be downloaded in a vector file format (SVG) from the Wikimedia commons (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Maps_by_United_Nations_Office_for_the_Coordination_of_Humanitarian_Affairs), which allows anybody to use them in print, web or broadcast products. Maps in various formats are available on the ReliefWeb Location Maps page. Therefore, any user can publish location maps as is, or edit each element of the content using tools such as Adobe Illustrator or Inkscape. There is no cost to use the maps, as they follow the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 unported licence.

Amanda McKee is the Communications and Outreach Officer for the Green Growth Knowledge Platform, a partnership of over 30 leading organizations that generate, manage and share green-growth knowledge. “Geographical context is important for understanding a country's efforts to transition to a green economy,” she said. “For the 193 country dashboards offered on the Green Growth Knowledge Platform, OCHA helps to provide this context through their comprehensive set of accurate and up-to-date location maps.”

“In our latest ‘World Population Prospects’, OCHA’s location maps were instrumental in providing very good quality country maps to the Population Division that were incorporated in the profiles,” said François Pelletier, Chief of Population Estimates and Projections at the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs. “OCHA was the only office who could offer a full collection of free quality location maps among all our partners.”