My name is Mr. Mbunzama Narcisse an Open street Map enthusiast based in the democratic republic of Congo. I had the chance to participate in the virtual Open Street Map Africa 2021 conference.

This conference was an opportunity for me first to learn about different projects on the Open Street Map implemented across the Africa continent, I also had the chance to acquire new knowledge on Open street Mapping tools and to meet and interact with other mappers from across the continent.

The sessions, the workshops were a unique opportunity for me to better understand certain concepts and to have a great insight on open street map use in Africa, going from different fields such as the Open street Map uses in School, women active in geospatial fields, the use of JOSM to map, Open street Map in health areas and other humanitarian and environmental fields where Open street Map use hugely use.

Overall the conference went well, and it was a success. However for a virtual conference and taking into account the time of the conference, it seemed very long taking into account other realities that we sometimes have in Africa such as regular power cuts, connection problems to the Internet. Internet. It would be better for future virtual conferences to see how to reduce the time of online meetings (For example from 12:00 to 18:00 will be very easily followed than a meeting from 10:00 to 20:00) and also to directly record the sessions and upload these videos to allow participants to review it even after the conference.