Wazimap has evolved into an online platform to showcase and get value from your data, along side standard open datasets like the census, community survey, and common sets of point data like service points and sites of protests.

Originally created in the run up to the 2014 elections because issues of labour, unemployment, crime, health, education challenges, transformation, sustainability, land, racism, xenophobia, poverty, inequality, gender-based violence and child abuse being so prevalent, we saw that each of these issues receive less than 2% of coverage.

In an effort to help journalists get reliable factual information to back up and give context to stories, unpack the different political dynamics in different hot spots and see elements of how they cover elections, we had an idea that we could try and mash data from the census carried out by Stats SA together with elections results and media coverage.

During a Hacks Hackers event, Media Monitoring Africa's (MMA) William Bird and OpenUp's Adi Eyal banded together to create a tool that could do just this. The name Wazi is derived from the IsiXhosa word “ulwazi” for knowledge which we believed resonated with the aim of Wazimap.

The original Wazimap was updated with every round of elections and mass survey releases. It was proven to be so successful that it was adapted for Kenya and Nigeria by OpenUp.

The repeated adoption of the platform motivated us to build Wazimap NG - the platform we now use to quickly set up views using these these commonly-used datasets, as well as uploading data relevant to each specific project.