Experts Hail Impact of Electronic Mapping on Africa
By Cristina Muller, ECA, 28 April 2005

Addis Ababa, 28 April 2005 - Geographic information and electronic mapping are helping African policymakers in areas such as urban planning, security, commercial delivery tracking, and environmental management.

Experts on geoinformation, meeting during the ECA-hosted Committee on Development Information in Addis Ababa this week, discussed innovative ways of managing delivery truck fleets in emergency situations, recovering stolen vehicles, redesigning communities and monitoring wildlife, among many other applications.

On a continent where mapping information has stalled from lack of resources since the colonial period, new technology - such as global navigation satellite systems, remote sensing and geographic information systems (GIS) - are helping Africa leap-frog over a number of stages in urban and rural planning, as well as commercial and security systems.

There are thousands of beneficial ways to use GIS, according to Professor Peter Odeniyi, Vice-Chancellor of the Federal University of Technology in Akure, Nigeria.

“A utility company may use GIS to identify assets such as pylons and masts in need of routine maintenance, a waste management company may use it to route waste collection vehicles, or a property management company may maintain hotel buildings and groups with the help of maps and plans from its GIS,” he said.

Unlike traditional mapping, he added, GIS is interdisciplinary.

A GIS map of a small region will typically contain complex detailed environmental information on land formation, drainage, vegetation, settlement patterns, roads and erosion. This in turn provides policymakers, planners and business with comprehensive information that can improve decision-making.

Apart from identifying safer areas for community redevelopment, GIS can also assist in providing an addressing system in areas where it previously did not exist.

The lack of an address is often a major problem for African businesses, for example, causing considerable losses, as clients are unable to locate them.

“Africa has not really taken GIS seriously, up to now. But it is time our governments take it on board,” said Dozie Ezigbalike, geoinformation specialist within ECA’s Development Information Services Division (DISD).

“It is really crucial to include citizens in the application of GIS in planning, for example,” he added. “Otherwise you can have cases where the information will be accessible to parties with economic interests not always sensitive to the common good.”

This has been the case in several African countries, where the authorities have used privileged GIS mapping information to benefit industrial farmers in land redistribution over traditional communities.

“Transparency – or good governance - is an important issue in GIS use, to avoid abuses,” Ezigbalike pointed out.

“But even broad-based participation needs to be handled with caution in many African communities, where you can open a whole can of historically-based grievances, with dramatic consequences for the whole structure of a community,” he warned.