Webmap of activities of the Comité National de Lutte contre le SIDA in Madagascar's activities

The 21^st international conference on AIDS has concluded a few days ago and the progress of the fight against this pandemia is still rather weak. New cases of HIV infections keeps up at a worrying level, registering 2.5 million per year according to recent reports.This is the context in which the CNLS (National Committee for the Fight against AIDS), along with the guidance of CartONG volunteers, takes place.

In 2013, Christophe Noualhat from UNAIDS in Madagascar, wanted to assist the Executive Secretariat of the National Committee for the Fight against AIDS (Comité National de Lutte contre le SIDA, CNLS) in creating an interactive cartographic tool that showed the interventions made by the civil society to tackle this issue in the island since 2013. This dynamic mapping aims to show in a clear and precise manner as much information as possible, answering the question: "Who does what, where, when and with whom?"

This tool aims to locate the actions in the territory as a whole, as well as identify the gaps in order to improve the strategies for the fight against AIDS implemented in the future by the CNLS. 

After a first stage of the project conducted by UN volunteers, a team from CartONG has taken it over and created a webmapping application, which articulates various open source solutions adapted to the needs of the CNLS. 

After a little bit more than a year of hard work from our volunteers, in June of this year we have finally launched our first prototype visible here: http://cnls.cartong.org/

On a  technical aspect, this project shows the capacity of CartONG to successfully lead complex volunteer-conducted projects foreseen for the long term. It is also important to highlight the contributions it provides to other webmapping projects; the Atlas Solidarité Madagascar and Mopti projects are going to benefit from this work via the share of methods to obtain a generic code that can be changeable and adaptable for different projects. 

Next steps will be: presenting the application to the CNLS and UNAIDS in Madagascar, give support to future users in order to get started with the cartographic tool and fix the bugs that will present in the next six months.