Kanhema with Google Street View equipment in Swakopmund, on Namibia's coast. Most of his time, though, was spent driving down the streets of Harare and the highways that connect Zimbabwe's major cities. There was a speedboat ride across the Zambezi River and a safari trip through a national park.
In 2018, Kanhema applied to borrow a 360-degree camera through Google's Street View camera loan program, and in the fall, he took a two-week trek through Zimbabwe with the equipment. But when it comes to the places Google hasn't prioritized, people like Kanhema can fill in the gaps. Most images on Street View are collected by drivers, and most of these drivers are employed by third parties that work with Google. To do that, Google often relies on volunteers who can either borrow the company's camera equipment or take photos using their own. He says the team is working to expand the service's reach. "We start in the large metropolitan areas where we know we have users, where it's easy for us to drive and we can execute quickly," says Stafford Marquardt, a product manager for Street View. "I found it quite jarring that a lot of the countries in the region were not on the map." "When you look at Street View, you're looking at this mosaic of images that show how people live across the world, how people conduct commerce, how people get around," he says. As Kanhema looked around more, many Western cities were on the platform, but only a handful of African countries were. The busy streets and shops, the schools he attended - none of it was there, and neither was the rest of Zimbabwe, a country in southern Africa with a population of more than 14 million. A self-described tech enthusiast now some 10,000 miles away from home, he was eager to see a virtual tour of the city.īut there was nothing to see. So when Tawanda Kanhema moved to the United States in 2009, he looked up his hometown of Harare, Zimbabwe's capital city, on the map of panoramic images. One of the first things people do when they use Google Street View is check out the place where they live. Tawanda Kanhema in 2018 wearing Google Street View camera gear at Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe.
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