Matcheli — Crowdsourced Wheelchair-Accessibility Mapping Co-Designed at Yerevan Mapathons

Armenia has long lacked reliable, publicly available information on which buildings, streets and public spaces are actually usable by wheelchair users, leaving people with mobility disabilities to guess or scout locations in person before visiting.

UNDP Armenia's Kolba Lab responded by incubating Matcheli ('accessible' in Armenian), an open web and mobile platform that lets anyone mark a location's wheelchair accessibility. Rather than commissioning a professional survey, Kolba Lab organised public mapathons in central Yerevan that brought together wheelchair users, parents pushing prams and cyclists to add accessible places to the map together — a direct co-design and co-production process with the community the tool serves.

Coverage has grown steadily since the 2016 launch: a national telecoms-news outlet (itel.am) reported roughly 400 mapped places and about 80 active users, while UNDP separately reports over 500 locations in Yerevan alone, with outreach extended to additional Armenian cities. The discrepancy between these figures reflects the absence of a single authoritative usage dashboard rather than any hidden manipulation.

No independent impact evaluation of Matcheli was found, and its user base remains modest for a national platform. Its main evidenced strengths are longevity — nearly a decade of continuous operation — and a genuinely participatory data-collection method, rather than measured outcomes for accessibility-seeking users.

Read the full analysis: https://itel.am/en/news/8383