Map your street. Verify your neighbourhood. Light up Africa.
Light Up Africa turns community mapping into visible, shared progress. Alkax suggests useful work near you, counts only trusted contributions, and illuminates map coverage as addresses are independently verified.
The basic loop is:
- Open the map and review nearby missions or an active campaign.
- Create, complete, or independently verify a place.
- Wait for the contribution to pass the required trust checks.
- Earn progress when the work becomes validated.
- Help your locality, team, and campaign move towards their goals.
Submitting more records is not the goal. The purpose is to create addresses that another person can recognise, trust, and navigate to.
Nearby missions
When you are signed in, Alkax can suggest two kinds of work around the current map area:
- Verify a place: confirm an address created by someone else when you have enough local knowledge to judge its pin and public details.
- Complete a place: improve one of your own records by adding missing description, photo, or building details.
Select a mission to focus the map on that place. Skip any mission you cannot complete safely or accurately. Never upvote a place simply to collect points.
Missions depend on the places available around the map. If none appear, move to another area, contribute a genuinely missing place, or return later.
Weekly locality challenges
A weekly challenge shows how many addresses in the nearby locality gained an independent verification during the current week. Every qualifying address advances the same community total.
The challenge is a coordination signal, not permission to lower the quality bar. Duplicate, inappropriate, or unverifiable records should be corrected or flagged rather than approved to reach the target.
Impact Points
Impact measures validated mapping work. Raw activity does not earn mapping points.
| Action | Impact Points |
|---|---|
| Submit a new address | 0 while pending |
| Your address receives its first independent upvote | +10 |
| Independently upvote another contributor's active place | +5 |
| Upvote your own place | 0 |
| Publish a community post | 0 |
A place awards its creator points once, when the first valid independent upvote makes it a trusted contribution. Additional upvotes can strengthen the place's community signals, but do not repeatedly award the creator.
Impact levels make longer-term progress easier to recognise:
| Impact level | Total Impact Points |
|---|---|
| Explorer | 0–99 |
| Pathfinder | 100–499 |
| Trailblazer | 500–1,499 |
| Beacon | 1,500+ |
Trust level
Trust progression is separate from Impact. It reflects the number of independent upvotes you have contributed to other people's places.
| Trust level | Independent verification signals |
|---|---|
| Observer | 0–4 |
| Scout | 5–19 |
| Guardian | 20–49 |
| Steward | 50+ |
A Trust level is a record of community verification activity. It is not legal certification, proof of identity, ownership, or professional authority.
Illuminated coverage
Shaded cells on the map represent areas containing trusted addresses. A cell begins to light up only when at least one active place in that area has received an independent upvote.
Coverage cells show where the network is becoming usable; they are not a population map, a legal boundary, or proof that every address in the area has been checked. Strong coverage comes from accurate pins, recognisable descriptions, useful entrance details, safe photographs, and independent review.
Team and sponsored campaigns
Campaigns let communities, universities, and partner organisations coordinate work around a place or goal. A campaign may show:
- its target locality or country;
- team and sponsor details;
- verified-contribution target and progress;
- participant ranking;
- reward description and qualifying threshold.
Join before contributing. Only qualifying work completed after you join and within the campaign rules counts towards your campaign total.
A sponsor label identifies who supports a challenge. It does not make every contribution or place an official record of that organisation.
Rewards and statuses
Some campaigns provide recognition or Pro time. Airtime and mobile-data rewards are cash-equivalent and always require manual review.
| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Locked | You have not yet reached the validated-contribution threshold. |
| Earned | A non-cash recognition reward has been earned. |
| Granted | An automatic benefit such as Pro time has been applied. |
| Pending review | You reached an airtime or data threshold, but fraud and quality checks are still required. |
| Blocked | A contribution is under review or was disqualified, so the reward cannot proceed. |
| Reversed | A previously earned or granted reward was withdrawn after the qualifying work ceased to be valid. |
Reaching a threshold does not bypass moderation. Airtime and data are not issued automatically, and a pending review is not a guarantee of payment.
Why progress can go down
If a qualifying place is hidden, removed, or placed under review, Alkax recomputes the affected contributor, campaign, and leaderboard progress. Points, campaign credit, or Pro days previously granted can be reversed.
This protects contributors who do careful work and keeps rewards tied to addresses that remain useful and trustworthy.
Map responsibly
- Verify only places you can assess from reliable local knowledge.
- Resolve duplicate warnings instead of creating another record.
- Put the pin where a visitor should arrive.
- Ask for consent before photographing private property or people.
- Do not expose sensitive household, health, security, or infrastructure details.
- Flag misleading, duplicated, unsafe, or inappropriate places.
- Do not coordinate votes or create records solely to gain points or rewards.
Create a high-quality address →
Understand verification and claims →
Read the community mapping workflow →