About Addressing The Unaddressed in Addressing the Unaddressed Russa Road (South), 1st Lane, Kolkata

Having a unique physical address enables people to engage with necessary day to day activities, such as accessing social welfare entitlements, receiving an identity card, voting, opening a bank account, and interacting with utility companies. Addressing the Unaddressed uses a simple technology to convert latitude and longitude coordinates to a series of letters and numbers, which then become the address.

Addressing the Unaddressed implements the system and develops a database of all addresses, which then can be licensed to the government, utility companies, non-profits, and other service providers.

The code used by Addressing the Unaddressed was developed by Alex Pigot in Ireland in response to the Irish government’s request for a post code which would make even more specific addresses in Ireland. Alex began to use the code in a very different context—the slums of India—in partnership with the Hope Foundation, which was interested in mapping and tracking progress on the places they were working.

Using GO codes is politically neutral, works all over the world, and allows for communities to develop organically without undue disruption to the addressing system.

To date, Addressing the Unaddressed has provided addresses to over 20,000 slum dwellings in Kolkata, India, reaching approximately 80,000 people. This has impacts both on dwellers and on institutions.

First, dwellers are able to use the addresses to access bank accounts, utilities, and government services. As one slum resident recounted, having an address allowed him to access health services, and he discovered he had diabetes. Once his information, with the GO Code, was registered, volunteers from the health center followed up with him to ensure he had the medications he needed.

Second, NGOs, banks, governments, and commercial enterprises who have access to the database are able to better serve the dwellers. For example, the Hope Foundation uses the code to collect primary data and map it based on the addressed dwellings. Further, the Indian government includes the GO Code in their Aardhar cards (the Indian national ID card system).

The code will work exactly the same way in any part of the world, and is thus a highly scaleable to informal settlements across the globe.

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