• 36 countries worldwide limit what wives can inherit from their husbands.
• 18 countries allow men to prohibit their wives from working.
• 17 countries limit when and how women can travel outside the home.

No wonder women make up only 0.5% of recorded history.

About the Mappa Mundi Project

Led by writer and broadcaster Sandi Toksvig and based at the University of Cambridge, the Mappa Mundi Project is creating a digital atlas that collects, centralises, and curates information documenting women’s voices, experiences, and expertise on a range of key themes around the world.

How does it work

Mappa Mundi is a three-dimensional, immersive, and interactive view of the globe from a female perspective. This online atlas creatively and compellingly communicates stories and data about women and their allies. You will be able to click on any country in the spinning globe and instantly gain an understanding of how women are doing in that part of the world. Those women will present their stories, hardships, and triumphs: from literacy and parliamentary representation to inspiring stories of the heroines of history and modern day activists. The atlas would combine new stories collected by the Mappa Mundi team with existing data from the UN, humanitarian and educational NGOs, and other organisations around the world. From this data-driven and story-led approach, we can extrapolate general themes and statistics which would be too overwhelming for the powerbrokers of today to ignore.

An accessible education resource

The atlas is designed to be an accessible educational resource that can be used in formal learning contexts while also facilitating informal education – which happens all the time on the internet. This project has a simple but essential goal – to tell women’s stories – changing the world by changing the way we look at it.

How will it be delivered

Mappa Mundi is an ambitious, global project, and so to go big, we need to start small: in Phase 1 and 2 we develop a pilot study of two specific contexts where we have strong contacts: the United Kingdom and Afghanistan. Once we have established this proof of concept for documenting women’s stories – whether these be artefacts, WhatsApp-based poems, or stories from NGOs – we will develop and scale the project through partnering with schools, education leaders, and researchers across the globe. Mappa Mundi will be based in the UK but inspired and powered by partnerships with women and women’s organisations around the world. We will engage the public with high-quality stories through town hall events, artefact exhibitions (the history of globe in 100 objects), and media broadcasting.

Working in partnership

The Mappa Mundi pilot study is a multidisciplinary project and partnership between the University of Cambridge Faculty of Education and the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, part of the Institute for Technology and Humanity.

This project has a simple but essential goal – to tell women’s stories – changing the world by changing the way we look at it.

Contact the project team

The project team can be contacted on mappamundi@lcfi.ac.uk

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