A fixed address matters — and in most countries, large numbers of homes don’t have one. Addresses don’t exist in the jumbles of self-built houses ringing most major cities in poor countries. Nomadic people have no way to describe where they’ve pitched their tents as they drive their livestock from place to place. Even permanent homes in some rural areas have no address.
Beyond the GPS, Mapping Every Place, Everywhere
by Tina Rosenberg
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/17/opinion/global-mapping-address.html
As a young reporter, I lived in Managua, Nicaragua. The city had been leveled by an earthquake in 1972 and never rebuilt. It was still a bit of a moonscape. It’s different now, but back then few streets had names and the houses had no addresses — not as we know them, anyway. If you needed to tell someone where you lived, you referenced well-known landmarks, for example: “two blocks south and 20 yards toward the lake from the giant tree.” Or worse, people would say “from where the giant tree used to be” — a tree that had been toppled in the earthquake.
I know what you’re thinking — if Managua had Domino’s Pizza back then, I would have won the 30-minutes-or-it’s-free challenge every time.
But I would have lost the challenge in which the ambulance tries to find me to get me to the hospital in time. Also the ones involving getting title to my land, signing up for electricity service or opening a bank account.
A fixed address matters — and in most countries, large numbers of homes don’t have one. Addresses don’t exist in the jumbles of self-built houses ringing most major cities in poor countries. Nomadic people have no way to describe where they’ve pitched their tents as they drive their livestock from place to place. Even permanent homes in some rural areas have no address.
I don’t remember my exact house in Managua, but the park in my neighborhood now has a fixed address: collar.senda.aire. My old house — wherever it is — has an address. Every house, park bench and patch of forest in the world does.
Although they sound like they’re made by people playing with word refrigerator magnets, the addresses come from a four-year-old company based in London, Johannesburg and Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, and called what3words. It was founded by Chris Sheldrick, a bassoonist who went into the live music events business after suffering a hand injury. Sheldrick was frustrated by equipment going astray, suppliers coming to the wrong place and musicians failing to find the venue. (Note: That may not be the only reason bands show up late.) He started looking for a better way to communicate location.
What3words isn’t a navigation or route optimization program; it provides a precise, easy-to-convey location you can type or speak into navigation or route optimization software.
Sheldrick and his colleagues laid an imaginary 10-foot-by-10-foot grid over the entire planet, creating 57 trillion squares. Every location, of course, already has a unique address — its longitude and latitude. These are represented by a set of Global Positioning System coordinates, a string of numbers up to 18 digits long. (A GPS device is something else, a machine that uses the Global Positioning System to lead you to an address you input.) What3words simply assigns each grid square’s GPS coordinates a unique three-word address that’s easier to remember, type and say.
Using this map or a phone app, you can find the three-word address of any location, or the exact location of any three-word address, in 14 languages — including Mongolian, Arabic, Swahili, and Russian.
Every 10-foot-by-10-foot place on earth has three-word addresses in all 14 languages, with 14 more in the works. Each language is coded independently; the same place that’s collar.senda.aire in Spanish is expect.twitchy.hazelnuts in English, which is very much not a translation. In each language, what3words tries to put a lot of distance between similar addresses — monkey.fork.coconut is in Japan, while monkey.forks.coconut is in Switzerland, for example. That way if you make a mistake, you realize it right away.
So what good is this?
Well, precise addressing is incredibly useful for delivery companies. One big client (and investor) is Aramex, a Dubai-based global transport and delivery company. Aramex recently did a test in two well-addressed neighborhoods in Dubai. It gave 100 packages each to two teams. One set of drivers, who knew the areas, used normal addresses. The other team, unfamiliar with the neighborhoods, used what3words addresses. The what3words drivers took 42 percent less time, drove a 22 percent shorter route and needed no phone calls; the street-address drivers had to make 25 calls to ascertain locations.
What3words was faster because the locations were precise, but also because that precision allowed Aramex to use route optimization software, which tells the driver the best way to sequence a string of deliveries.
“A standard geocoder off-the-shelf is not accurate enough,” said Jack Levis, a senior director of engineering at UPS, which uses a route optimization system Levis designed, called Orion. “Your navigation system says you’ve arrived, but you’re not there,” he said. “For you and your personal vehicle, that inaccuracy is just an annoyance. But you feed it into an algorithm like Orion and it becomes a disaster.” If every driver adds one mile to his or her daily route, that costs UPS $50 million a year. And then there are the environmental costs of fuel and idling.
UPS uses package delivery history to pinpoint exactly where a driver should go. “We know the difference between where the driver parks and where the driver delivers,” he said. “We ended up creating the most accurate maps in the world.”
Levis said that its data efforts since 2004 have saved the company 185 million miles per year.
The value of what3words is that it can be used by anyone, anywhere: a driver in Los Angeles who wants to get a kidney to a recipient at the right hospital wing and entrance. Earthquake rescue teams in Mexico City. Attendees at Burning Man trying to find one another’s tents. Ground crews of the Red Cross in the Philippines telling headquarters exactly where help is needed. Mongolia’s postal service, which has trouble reaching slum dwellers and nomads. All those people do, in fact, use it. (Eight postal services are using or preparing to use what3words, including Nigeria’s.)
The system works only if people are aware of these addresses and know or can find the one marking their location. Also, the person or institution trying to reach a destination must be able to handle and make sense of a three-word address.
This will be slow work. But here’s why it could be worthwhile:
Dr. Coenie Louw leads South Africa’s Gateway Health Institute. Gateway works in informal settlements (sometimes known as slums), using technology to improve health, nutrition and human rights.
A recent challenge, Louw said, was devising a way to transport pregnant women to the hospital if labor became complicated. Louw said that 34,000 babies die each year in South Africa before they get to the hospital. One reason is that an ambulance can take hours to arrive. And one reason for that is that 1.7 million dwellings in South Africa have no addresses, according to Louw.
“I could never really locate them accurately,” he said. “People will say: ‘I live three doors away from the blue shebeen across from the green crèche.’” (That’s the blue pub and the green child-care center.) “Ambulances don’t find that. The idea is to give them a proper location so they can drive right there and there’s no issue.”
Last year, he read an article about what3words and contacted them to see if the system might be able to save some babies. (What3words charges businesses but provides its software free to humanitarian or disaster efforts.)
Gateway first chose an area to work in, an informal settlement in the city of Durban called KwaNdengezi. The organization hired 11 young people to go door to door, helping residents find their addresses and writing them down on cards to be posted on the door or just kept somewhere safe. The Gateway workers also registered the name, phone number and if the resident was willing, her official identification number, at every house.
When someone calls an ambulance, she gives the three-word address to the dispatcher, who tells it to the driver, who plugs it into a navigation app that accepts such addresses (Navmii is one) or uses what3words’s navigation app.
KwaNdengezi has 11,500 dwellings. Registering them is a slow process, as people must work in teams for safety. The group has almost reached 4,000, Louw said — enough to start testing whether ambulances get there faster with the three-word address system.
Precise addresses could improve health in other ways. Only about half of new mothers in South Africa are still taking their H.I.V. medicines correctly a year after delivery. This could change if community health workers were able to track down people who stop coming into the clinic. Gateway just won a prize from Viiv, a pharmaceutical company that specializes in H.I.V., for a project to help women take their meds more successfully — including using what3words to allow health workers to find them.
Gateway is also mapping liquor outlets, and mapping incidents of rape and other violence against women, and overlapping the two. The group plans to identify hot spots for violence, allowing the government to focus its scarce resources on the most dangerous places.
If these pilot projects work, Louw hopes to take the evidence to the South African and other African governments, to persuade them to recognize what3words addresses — an enormous administrative challenge.
“You can’t get a SIM card activated in South Africa without proof of residence,” Louw said. “Employers want to be able to find you. If you don’t have a proper address, you’re seen as not stable. Even to vote you have to have proof of residence. This is much more than just emergency services.”
United Nations Disaster Reporting App & what3words
3 words to help report in natural disasters & humanitarian crises