Mozambique Disaster Response & Emergency Service Finder for Map<>kathon 2026
# Mozambique Disaster Response & Emergency Service Finder
**Map<>kathon 2026 submission**
A bilingual web dashboard that answers one question as fast as possible during an
emergency: *where is the nearest help, and how long will it take to get there?*
Pick a location anywhere in Mozambique — by GPS, by dropping a pin, or by
searching for a place — and the dashboard ranks the five closest health,
shelter, rescue, water and transport facilities, draws a road route to any of
them, and exports the whole assessment as a bilingual PDF briefing.
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## The problem
When a cyclone makes landfall at Beira or the Limpopo floods Gaza province, the
people coordinating the response are rarely the people who know the area. A
district officer redeployed from Nampula, an incoming NGO logistics lead, a
volunteer driver — all need the same thing within minutes of arriving: a
reliable picture of what services exist nearby and how far away they are.
That information exists in OpenStreetMap. It is not usable in a hurry. It is
spread across two dozen thematic extracts, in a projected coordinate system that
silently distorts distance, with hundreds of sparse attribute columns and no
ranking, no routing, and no Portuguese.
This project turns that raw data into an operational tool.
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## What it does
**Find your position three ways.** Live GPS with graceful handling of every
permission failure, a pin-drop mode you can activate from the sidebar or from
the map itself, or a place search restricted to Mozambique so "Beira" returns
the port city rather than the Portuguese district.
**Rank the five nearest facilities** by true geodesic distance, with an
estimated travel time that scales with trip length rather than assuming one
average speed for a 900-metre walk and a 90-kilometre drive.
**Route to any of them** over the real road network, with an evacuation vehicle
travelling the line in humanitarian livery, so direction of travel and relative
leg length read at a glance.
**Filter …