The days of making numerous stops and asking for directions on a long journey whose route you are not familiar with soon drawing to a close. Soon you will be able to locate your home, school, hospital, office and the distance from where you are online, thanks to Google Maps. Under a Project with Uganda Bureau of Statistics (UBOS), Google is mapping the entire country, starting with 8,000schools. The project is intended to bring the country on online maps. The global search giant is targeting 30,000 places of interest such as banks and hospitals, but private businesses can also place their locations online, all for free and by themselves, according to Dorothy Ooko, Google's head of communication and public affairs for East and Southern Africa.
"It doesnot cost you anything to have your presence online. You can even map your home and share it with your friends who may use the maps to locate you if you are hosting a party," said Ooko. The initiative is great for small business to market themselves, especially among the growing online community. All one needs is a Google account, according to Ooko. There are currently about 600,000 Facebook accounts and thousands of Twitter accounts with the users spending a good amount of time online, which creates a good marketing space.
"For you, the business can be discovered by the six billion people who use Google search," she says. The motivation for people to turn to online services has been driven by online platforms helping people find the information they are looking for. Standard Chartered Bank has for instance reportedly given information about the location of their ATMs and they want this all mapped. Because a good number of people using online services, they are also potential customers of Standard Chartered Bank. So using navigation one can locate the nearest ATM by using their phone.
ORIGIN
Google Maps have been around for years. But for Uganda, three years ago, a young man working then with a telecom company got frustrated when he was trying to execute his job in areas not easy to locate in the country. He voluntarily set out to map the country starting with some select places in Kampala. Seven roads were mapped. Three years on, a number 0of schools, hospitals have been mapped, including Makerere University that has been mapped by student volunteers.
