Whose Job Is It to Find the Mosquitoes? How Participatory Mapping Brings Communities, Schools, and Institutions Together.
- WTA Labs Researcher Network
- Aug 14
- 6 min read
"...the people most affected by a problem are also among the best equipped to describe it, and that they have a natural and valuable seat at the table alongside researchers and officials. "
by Sangreo, Neil Keno D., Corpuz, John Aaron D., and Cipriano, Timothy James L.
Dengue is not a mystery disease. We know what causes it, we know what breeds it, and we can often guess, almost street by street, where it will strike again this year. The Aedes aegypti mosquito does not hide. It lives in open drums, clogged canals, discarded tires, and the small pools of water that collect on rooftops after every storm. And yet, year after year, the Philippines reports tens of thousands of dengue cases, with dense urban barangays often bearing the heaviest toll (World Health Organization, 2025). If the cause is so well understood, what would it take to get ahead of it? Part of the answer lies in a gap that public health systems everywhere navigate. Nationwide data tells us where people got sick after the fact. It tells us not about the everyday conditions, the specific drainage systems, vacant lots, or the waste piles that made the outbreak possible in the first place (Interior et al., 2024). Closing that gap does not solely require new technology. Communities already know where the water collects and where the trash piles up. What is needed is a structured, collaborative way for that knowledge to be gathered, organized, and put to use, alongside the institutions already working to address it.
Participatory community mapping, where residents work alongside researchers to document hazards, hotspots, and risk factors in their own neighborhoods, has long been recognized as good practice in public health and disaster planning. Studies from across Southeast Asia have shown that residents, given the tools and the platform, can identify risk sites with a precision that complements what outside experts and remote data provide on their own (Dickin, Schuster-Wallace, & Elliott, 2014). This is an encouraging finding. It means the people most affected by a problem are also among the best equipped to describe it, and that they have a natural and valuable seat at the table alongside researchers and officials.
A risk map produced and validated by residents becomes something more than a record. It becomes shared evidence, something a barangay council, a city health office, a partner school, and a research team can all refer to from the same starting point. The strength of these maps lies not only in their accuracy, but in how the process of making them brings different actors together around a common picture of their shared environment. Far from standing apart from official efforts, this kind of community-generated evidence is most useful precisely when it feeds directly into the planning and programs that local governments and health offices already run, such as the Department of Health's Enhanced 4S Strategy (Department of Health, 2018), giving these programs sharper, more local detail to work with.
This is also why initiatives that carry out this kind of mapping should be seen as partners rather than as stopgaps. A community-based mapping project does not compete with the work of local government units, barangay health workers, or national agencies. It complements that work, surfacing detail that larger systems are not always designed to capture on their own, and offering it in a form that can be acted on. When residents, researchers, schools, and barangay officials sit down together over a shared map, the conversation tends to move quickly from identifying problems to planning what to do about them.
In conversations about community-based work in the Philippines, it has become almost reflexive to say that schools and teachers should be at the center. Teachers know their communities, teachers are trusted, and teachers are, in fact, already there. This is true, but it also calls for a closer look at exactly where, and how, that involvement should happen. Filipino public school teachers already carry a heavy load of non-teaching work, from data encoding and election duties to feeding programs and disaster response. Reports from teachers' groups have repeatedly raised this as one of the more persistent, unresolved problems in basic education, one that the Second Congressional Commission on Education (EDCOM 2) and the Department of Education itself has acknowledged. Any effort to involve schools in community health work has to take this reality seriously. The goal should not be to add one more task to an already full plate.
This is precisely where teacher education institutions (TEIs), have a natural and valuable role, one that fits squarely into what they already do best. Rather than asking practicing teachers to take on new duties, TEIs can build community-based research, spatial literacy, and participatory methods directly into how future teachers are formed. A future teacher who has gone through this kind of training enters the profession already familiar with how to read a hazard map, how to talk with barangay officials about local risks, and how to help a school connect its own activities, like clean-up drives or health campaigns, to a clearer picture of the surrounding community.
Framed this way, the work becomes part of the professional foundation a teacher brings with them. Something they carry into their schools as a natural extension of who they already are, rather than a separate project layered on top of their job. TEIs are also well placed to sustain this kind of engagement over time, since faculty researchers, student teachers, and partner communities can return to the same areas across multiple semesters and cohorts, building familiarity and trust that deepens with each cycle.
Community-based research and extension initiatives led by universities and their partner communities are often modest in scale; a handful of faculty and students working closely with one or two barangays and schools. But modest scale should not be mistaken for modest contribution. These initiatives are where methods are tested and refined in real conditions, where students gain direct experience that will shape how they engage with communities throughout their careers, and where local governments and national agencies can see, concretely, what a participatory approach to local health risks looks like in practice.
The best way to see these initiatives is not as separate from larger public health and disaster response systems, but as an active part of them, operating at a scale where relationships can be built, methods can be adapted to local context, and lessons can travel both ways. A barangay health office benefits from a community-validated map. A research team benefits from the local knowledge that years of barangay partnership provide. A school benefits from a closer link between its own health and environmental programs and the bigger picture of its community. None of these relationships needs to wait for the others. They can, and increasingly do, develop together.
Seen this way, the relationship between these initiatives and larger institutions is one of collaboration from the start, each strengthening what the other is able to do. TEIs and their research units are well positioned to anchor this kind of collaboration precisely because they sit at the intersection of research, education, and community life. The same students who participate in a mapping project today may, a few years later, be the teachers who bring this orientation into their own schools, and the researchers who help the next community build on what has already been learned.
Dengue, flooding, and other recurring hazards in Philippine communities are shaped by infrastructure, budgets, and coordination that involve many institutions working together over time. The experience of participatory, community-based initiatives suggests a genuinely hopeful direction for that collaboration. When residents, schools, local officials, and researchers work from the same map, quite literally, conversations about what needs to happen next tend to become more concrete, more specific, and more collaborative. TEIs are in a good position to nurture this kind of collaboration by shaping how future teachers understand their relationship to the communities they will serve, and by sustaining long-term partnerships that local governments and health offices can rely on. The initiatives happening now in individual barangays are not separate from the larger effort to address public health challenges. They are an active, growing part of it, and a sign of what becomes possible when communities, schools, and researchers choose to work things out together, side by side.
References
Department of Health (Philippines). (2018). Administrative Order No. 2018-0021: Guidelines for the nationwide implementation of the Enhanced 4S-Strategy against Dengue, Chikungunya and Zika.
Dickin, S. K., Schuster-Wallace, C. J., & Elliott, S. J. (2014). Mosquitoes & vulnerable spaces: Mapping local knowledge of sites for dengue control in Seremban and Putrajaya, Malaysia. Applied Geography, 46, 71–79.
Interior, J. S., Bigay, K. J. J., Iringan, R. A. A., & Tanco, M. B. F. (2024). Resurgence of dengue in the Philippines. World Journal of Virology, 13(3), 99179.
World Health Organization. (2017). Global vector control response 2017–2030.
World Health Organization. (2025, August 21). Dengue and severe dengue.
This piece was written by Sangreo, Neil Keno D. John Aaron D. Corpuz, and Cipriano, Timothy James L., as part of the 2026 Batch 01 cohort of the WTA Labs Research Grants Program (RGP). WTA Labs supports research on space, place, cities, and communities through grants of up to PHP 25,000.00. Their featured research project is titled "Project DengMAP: Participatory Dengue Risk Mapping and Community Decision Tools for Barangays"
