KHARTOUMAP: THE YOUTH-LED PROJECT THAT MADE KHARTOUM’S TRANSIT SYSTEM VISIBLE
TEAM MEMBERS AND ORGANIZATIONS THAT WORKED ON MAPPING KHARTOUM:
ILHAM ALI, MIT Technology and Policy student and KhartouMap co-initiator, focused on mobility, data, and equity.
AWAD ABDELHALIM, civil engineer specializing in transportation systems and Khartoum co-founder, helped design and implement KhartouMap’s digital transit mapping.
ABUBAKR ZIEDAN, transit planner and KhartouMap Head of GIS and Transit Data; formerly worked at Sudan’s Ministry of Infrastructure.
RAZAN OSMAN, Validation Lead KhartouMap.
JEHAD EL-MAMUN, Head of Onground Operations.
SHUKRAN BADR, Communications Lead.
AHMED YASSIR, AHMED ABBAS, and ABDULRAHMAN ANAS, Mapping Leads.
ILHAM ALI, MIT Technology and Policy student and KhartouMap co-initiator, focused on mobility, data, and equity.
AWAD ABDELHALIM, civil engineer specializing in transportation systems and Khartoum co-founder, helped design and implement KhartouMap’s digital transit mapping.
ABUBAKR ZIEDAN, transit planner and KhartouMap Head of GIS and Transit Data; formerly worked at Sudan’s Ministry of Infrastructure.
RAZAN OSMAN, Validation Lead KhartouMap.
JEHAD EL-MAMUN, Head of Onground Operations.
SHUKRAN BADR, Communications Lead.
AHMED YASSIR, AHMED ABBAS, and ABDULRAHMAN ANAS, Mapping Leads.
In response to a public transportation crisis and shortage in Khartoum between 2019 and 2022, a group of young Sudanese researchers began trying to help fix Khartoum’s public transportation system. Their goal wasn’t flashy—a map and digital data of bus routes. But in a city where more than 80% of residents relied on public transit daily, it was a revolutionary idea.
They called the project KhartouMap.
Launched in 2022, KhartouMap set out to document the city’s entire muwasalat public transit network—one of the most relied-upon but least understood systems in Sudan. Despite its critical role in daily life, Khartoum had no public map, no trip planner, and no digital record of how its people moved. Riders navigated the city through habit, memory, and whispered directions—until now.
What made Khartoum’s transit system stand out wasn’t its complexity, but its structure. Unlike many cities in the Atlas where informal systems have been mapped by outside actors, Khartoum’s network was shaped internally. It followed a semi-formal model, with routes designated by the government and licenses issued by the Ministry of Transportation. It was not fully informal nor entirely formal—but it had never been comprehensively mapped.
WHERE THE BLUE AND WHITE NILE RIVERS CONVERGE
Khartoum is a city of meeting points—where the Blue and White Nile rivers converge at Al-Mogran, where bustling markets overlap with quiet courtyards, and where the old city center fades into sprawling neighborhoods on the edge of the desert. The city is vast, lively, and often unpredictable. In the heat of midday, its streets buzz with minibuses and buses dodging potholes, honking through traffic, picking up passengers from curbside hubs and dusty intersections alike.
Here, transit isn’t just infrastructure. It’s daily life. For students, market vendors, government workers, and caretakers, the bus is where conversations start, bills are passed hand to hand, and a shared rhythm connects neighborhoods that might otherwise feel worlds apart.
“Transit in Khartoum isn’t something separate from the city,” said project GIS lead Abubakr Ziedan, a transit planner who previously worked at Sudan’s Ministry of Infrastructure. “It’s how the city works.”
A TEAM THAT CROSSED CONTINENT
The team behind KhartouMap came together across borders—but was united by a shared connection to home. The idea began in conversations between Ilham Ali, a Sudanese-American graduate student at MIT studying technology and policy, and Awad Abdelhalim, a Sudanese civil engineer and postdoc specializing in transportation systems at MIT’s Urban Mobility Lab. Both had spent time navigating Khartoum’s streets and buses and were deeply aware of the city’s worsening transit crisis.
They knew the challenge wasn’t just about infrastructure—it was about visibility, access, and equity. To move the project from idea to action, they reached out to Abubakr Ziedan, who had once considered launching a similar mapping effort from inside Sudan’s Ministry of Infrastructure. A decade earlier, he had pitched the idea of building a GTFS dataset for Khartoum. But at the time, sanctions had blocked access to mapping tools, and a lack of local data had stalled the work.
“When Awad called me, it felt like something that had been paused for ten years was finally ready to move again,” Ziedan recalled.
From that point, the team grew—bringing together members from Sudan on the ground in Khartoum, each contributing technical expertise, lived experience, and an intimate understanding of the transit system they hoped to map. The team included Razan Osmana, Jehad El-Mamun, Shukran Badr, and mapping leads Ahmed Yassir, Ahmed Abbas, and Abdulrahman Anas.
They called the project KhartouMap.
Launched in 2022, KhartouMap set out to document the city’s entire muwasalat public transit network—one of the most relied-upon but least understood systems in Sudan. Despite its critical role in daily life, Khartoum had no public map, no trip planner, and no digital record of how its people moved. Riders navigated the city through habit, memory, and whispered directions—until now.
What made Khartoum’s transit system stand out wasn’t its complexity, but its structure. Unlike many cities in the Atlas where informal systems have been mapped by outside actors, Khartoum’s network was shaped internally. It followed a semi-formal model, with routes designated by the government and licenses issued by the Ministry of Transportation. It was not fully informal nor entirely formal—but it had never been comprehensively mapped.
WHERE THE BLUE AND WHITE NILE RIVERS CONVERGE
Khartoum is a city of meeting points—where the Blue and White Nile rivers converge at Al-Mogran, where bustling markets overlap with quiet courtyards, and where the old city center fades into sprawling neighborhoods on the edge of the desert. The city is vast, lively, and often unpredictable. In the heat of midday, its streets buzz with minibuses and buses dodging potholes, honking through traffic, picking up passengers from curbside hubs and dusty intersections alike.
Here, transit isn’t just infrastructure. It’s daily life. For students, market vendors, government workers, and caretakers, the bus is where conversations start, bills are passed hand to hand, and a shared rhythm connects neighborhoods that might otherwise feel worlds apart.
“Transit in Khartoum isn’t something separate from the city,” said project GIS lead Abubakr Ziedan, a transit planner who previously worked at Sudan’s Ministry of Infrastructure. “It’s how the city works.”
A TEAM THAT CROSSED CONTINENT
The team behind KhartouMap came together across borders—but was united by a shared connection to home. The idea began in conversations between Ilham Ali, a Sudanese-American graduate student at MIT studying technology and policy, and Awad Abdelhalim, a Sudanese civil engineer and postdoc specializing in transportation systems at MIT’s Urban Mobility Lab. Both had spent time navigating Khartoum’s streets and buses and were deeply aware of the city’s worsening transit crisis.
They knew the challenge wasn’t just about infrastructure—it was about visibility, access, and equity. To move the project from idea to action, they reached out to Abubakr Ziedan, who had once considered launching a similar mapping effort from inside Sudan’s Ministry of Infrastructure. A decade earlier, he had pitched the idea of building a GTFS dataset for Khartoum. But at the time, sanctions had blocked access to mapping tools, and a lack of local data had stalled the work.
“When Awad called me, it felt like something that had been paused for ten years was finally ready to move again,” Ziedan recalled.
From that point, the team grew—bringing together members from Sudan on the ground in Khartoum, each contributing technical expertise, lived experience, and an intimate understanding of the transit system they hoped to map. The team included Razan Osmana, Jehad El-Mamun, Shukran Badr, and mapping leads Ahmed Yassir, Ahmed Abbas, and Abdulrahman Anas.
DATA FOR IMPACT
Their approach was twofold: first, to create a GTFS dataset, the global standard for digital transit maps; and second, to generate wide public engagement through surveys, outreach, and participatory design. Over 8,000 people responded to their survey both online and on the ground at bus stops and intersections, providing a window into how and why people moved across the city.
Just as critical was their accessibility analysis, which revealed underserved areas or transit deserts in certain neighborhoods in municipalities like Omdurman, Sharg El-Nile, Bahri, Karrari, and Umbadda, where transit access lagged behind. These were areas where the nearest transit option was more than a 15 minute walk. The team was also able to show the distance to reach the nearest hospital, school, bank, or university by public transit from each neighborhood.
In central Khartoum, the distance to the nearest amenity could be ten times closer in many cases compared to other areas of the city. This was the first comprehensive analysis of its type and showed the power of the dataset that KhartouMap was creating. These insights weren’t just technical—they were actionable. They showed where service improvements were needed most and gave entrepreneurs and innovators a starting point for change.
“Many companies and innovators were interested in using our data,” said Ilham Ali, co-founder of KhartouMap. “Some were looking to create new bus routes or improve frequency on popular lines. We hoped this baseline data could lead to real solutions.”
FIRST EVER PAPER MAP
One of the most celebrated milestones came when Razan Osmana designed the first-ever paper map of Khartoum’s bus system. For many, it was the first time they had ever seen the system laid out in one place. People could finally see the city the way they experienced it.
Even Awad, who was very familiar with public transit in Khartoum from his university days, was surprised by the full map. “I thought I was very familiar with the system, and I knew most of it,” said Awad, co-founder of KhartouMap. “But I was surprised by some of the busier corridors, looking at how much public transit is there.”
The map became a tool for everyday riders—and a symbol of what happens when cities are made visible, from the ground up.
MAPPING INTERRUPTED, NOT ENDED
By early 2023, the team had completed most of the data collection and validation. But in April, war broke out in Khartoum. Planned hackathons and innovation challenges had to be canceled. The team donated their remaining budget to emergency relief efforts instead and raised a matching amount from their supporters, as well.
Today, KhartouMap stands as the closest record of “normal” Khartoum before the war. With most private cars now looted or destroyed, the city’s 80% transit dependency has likely climbed to near total reliance. The data may become a vital resource in one day rebuilding the system.
Even so, the team is cautious about how they frame the project’s future role. “We don’t want to make big claims about rebuilding,” they emphasized. “The scale of the war’s impact is far beyond what our data can address. But we do hope it can be useful one day.”
For now, KhartouMap stands as a testament to what’s possible when young people take the lead in shaping their cities. It didn’t come from a government office or an international consultancy. It came from people who knew the system—because they had grown up riding it—and who believed that something as simple as a map could become the foundation for something bigger.
Their approach was twofold: first, to create a GTFS dataset, the global standard for digital transit maps; and second, to generate wide public engagement through surveys, outreach, and participatory design. Over 8,000 people responded to their survey both online and on the ground at bus stops and intersections, providing a window into how and why people moved across the city.
Just as critical was their accessibility analysis, which revealed underserved areas or transit deserts in certain neighborhoods in municipalities like Omdurman, Sharg El-Nile, Bahri, Karrari, and Umbadda, where transit access lagged behind. These were areas where the nearest transit option was more than a 15 minute walk. The team was also able to show the distance to reach the nearest hospital, school, bank, or university by public transit from each neighborhood.
In central Khartoum, the distance to the nearest amenity could be ten times closer in many cases compared to other areas of the city. This was the first comprehensive analysis of its type and showed the power of the dataset that KhartouMap was creating. These insights weren’t just technical—they were actionable. They showed where service improvements were needed most and gave entrepreneurs and innovators a starting point for change.
“Many companies and innovators were interested in using our data,” said Ilham Ali, co-founder of KhartouMap. “Some were looking to create new bus routes or improve frequency on popular lines. We hoped this baseline data could lead to real solutions.”
FIRST EVER PAPER MAP
One of the most celebrated milestones came when Razan Osmana designed the first-ever paper map of Khartoum’s bus system. For many, it was the first time they had ever seen the system laid out in one place. People could finally see the city the way they experienced it.
Even Awad, who was very familiar with public transit in Khartoum from his university days, was surprised by the full map. “I thought I was very familiar with the system, and I knew most of it,” said Awad, co-founder of KhartouMap. “But I was surprised by some of the busier corridors, looking at how much public transit is there.”
The map became a tool for everyday riders—and a symbol of what happens when cities are made visible, from the ground up.
MAPPING INTERRUPTED, NOT ENDED
By early 2023, the team had completed most of the data collection and validation. But in April, war broke out in Khartoum. Planned hackathons and innovation challenges had to be canceled. The team donated their remaining budget to emergency relief efforts instead and raised a matching amount from their supporters, as well.
Today, KhartouMap stands as the closest record of “normal” Khartoum before the war. With most private cars now looted or destroyed, the city’s 80% transit dependency has likely climbed to near total reliance. The data may become a vital resource in one day rebuilding the system.
Even so, the team is cautious about how they frame the project’s future role. “We don’t want to make big claims about rebuilding,” they emphasized. “The scale of the war’s impact is far beyond what our data can address. But we do hope it can be useful one day.”
For now, KhartouMap stands as a testament to what’s possible when young people take the lead in shaping their cities. It didn’t come from a government office or an international consultancy. It came from people who knew the system—because they had grown up riding it—and who believed that something as simple as a map could become the foundation for something bigger.