The Tracks4Africa community of Africa nomads are experienced overland and self-drive travellers who love to share their experiences and help to map Africa. They truly love and respect Africa and its peoples and natural resources and share ideas on how to plan your trip, what equipment you need to travel into Africa and how to navigate yourself to wherever you want to be.
How we build the map
The Tracks4Africa (T4A) community is the very foundation of T4A. Membership to the T4A community is open, free and voluntary. This is a community of like-minded travellers who love sharing their travel experience, albeit GPS tracks, photos or information.
The Tracks4Africa map set is built from the GPS recordings of this community of travellers. The T4A community has adopted the honey badger as its icon because the symbiosis between a badger and honey birds explains the principle of building a map from the data received from a community of travellers.
These data members submit their GPS tracks that were recorded in accordance with T4A quality standards into the T4A data vault. Today this vault contains 7.5 million km of raw GPS track data and 215,000 waypoint data submissions from members of the T4A Data Community.
Tracks4Africa Pty Ltd is a separate commercial entity since May 2005 and is responsible for building the maps from the data received from the T4A community as well as associated products from information and photos received from this community.
What makes the T4A map so special?
The T4A map is NOT a city navigator or an Atlas. Strictly speaking it is NOT a map. It is the collective navigational experience of data members of the T4A data community on countless leisure and business trips to eco-destinations into remote and eco-sensitive Africa.
The T4A map is NOT merely about roads, it is about destinations and it is about attention to detail, but mostly it is about information. The road lines and points of interest on the T4A map is constructed mainly from GPS recorded/confirmed data and data submissions from the T4A community. The road lines on the T4A map is spatially averaged from many independent GPS recordings. This makes the T4A map super accurate, reliable and unique.
The T4A map is a GPS map constructed by travellers for travellers, people who are serious about travel safety and about the environment.
With more than 1 000 data members who are actively submitting their data, the map will never be complete. Moreover, Africa and its roads changes with every rainy season and the rules for driving on them change with every new local political order. For this reason the T4A GPS Maps are upgraded twice a year (May and Oct).
T4A GPS Maps actually comprises of 16 regional maps of Africa, which gives a seamless map on both computer screen and GPS. It is possible to buy the whole set on SD Card or individual regional maps can be bought from our online shop.
The T4A GPS Maps cover almost 774 000 km of navigable roads in Africa and feature over 126 000 Points of Interest. These POIs include camping and lodging, fuel stations, banks and ATMs, places to shop, picnic spots, attractions, activities, auto services, emergency services, entertainment, restaurants, landmarks, viewpoints, and tourist information centers.
These maps are not only available for Garmin GPS, but also for Caska compatible in-car navigation systems and on Applications for Apple and Android devices.
The tracks, information and photos that were contributed by our data members also found their way to specialist products like paper maps and self-drive guide books. On top of this the T4A website offers a wealth of information for free.
Well done, Philip! I take my hat off to you.
How about my experience, which was done mostly on Tracks4Africa tracks? Check my blog at One Giant Challenge. The actual trip was from Beitbridge to Bloubergstrand via Mpumalanga, Kwazulu-Natal, eastern Cape. A distance of 3,308 km over 32 days.