MappGuru, A Universal Addressing System for the Unstructured Areas

An address system is an essential infrastructure which paves the way for social and economic development. It allows people to connect, improves emergency response, increases access to utilities and facilitates postal services and the delivery of goods. On the other hand a digital address infrastructure is undeniably essential for many other processes such as opening bank accounts, the creation of national ID Cards, voting and representing sets of information in data collection and analysis, as well as in marketing and in population census. Designing an addressing system suitable for all countries is challenging. This paper presents a solution by providing a comprehensive universal addressing system—the MappGuru—designed to function as a standardized addressing system with the ability to provide postcode and addresses to any properties. The MappGuru addressing system suggests a unique process to assign addresses based on an existing postcode. The MappGuru addresses are easy for human to understand and can inherently be integrated with information technology systems. To illustrate the MappGuru addressing system, a dedicated section consisting of a case study to assign addresses to an unstructured area in Kigali/Rwanda is described.