Building the African Regional Spatial Data Infrastructure for Africa (ARSDI)
Within its programme of Harnessing Information for Development, ECA has undertaken major actions to strengthen the capacity of member States to set up institutional arrangements and implement national policies and programmes that reinforce the linkages within the nexus of food security, population, economy, environment and human settlements. This strategy places emphasis on the building of an African Regional Spatial Data Infrastructure for Africa (ARSDI) linked with the National Information and Communication Infrastructure (NICI) plans. This will involve negotiating coordination, interoperability and data sharing arrangements with partners, including nodes at national levels, which ECA and partners will assist in developing.
During the past years, progress was made on integrating geoinformation policies into the national ICT policies of member States. A number of countries have taken steps aimed at developing their National Spatial Data Infrastructures (NSDI) and Geo-information policies. However, the funding constraints have stalled some of the activities for concrete implementation of technical components of NSDI.
ECA has been providing assistance to Member States in developing national geographic information infrastructures (NSDI). Interventions have included advisory services on the establishment of NSDI steering bodies (Côte-d’Ivoire and Burundi in 2007), drafting of the action plan for a “Plan Géomatique National” (Côte-d’Ivoire and Niger in 2008); reference materials and reviewing drafts of policy documents to integrate NSDI into NICI (Sierra Leone in 2007 and 2008); Technical assistance to develop national geoinformation resources (Sierra Leone in 2008); e-mail discussion with the Office of the Surveyor General in Swaziland to develop the NSDI document as a special technical annex to the NICI document. In January 2008, the Sierra Leone Ministry of Lands, Country Planning and Environment (MoLCPE), towards the fulfillment of their National Lands Policy, requested ECA's technical assistance in geoinformation and mapping to begin to recreate the spatial data infrastructure of Sierra Leone with a focus, in the first instance, to support infrastructure redevelopment. ECA undertook in-country consultations with relevant stakeholders to review the draft geo-enabled NICI document and chart the way forward in addressing the country request for: i) featuring the catalogue of Sierra Leone's existing spatial data holdings; ii) assessing the need for training in geospatial metadata capture and dissemination; iii) assessing the feasibility of a data rescue programme to digitize and vectorize the extant hardcopy map collection; iv) drafting of a national standard for digital spatial data; and v) drafting of a term of reference for a national land administration system. ECA has also organised an in-country training on capturing and dissemination of geospatial metadata to the Ministry of Lands, Community Planning, Environment, and Statistics and partners from the local GIS community.
Despite the efforts of ECA and other partners, progress in developing SDIs in Africa has been very slow, due mainly to poor awareness and understanding of the link between the content and components of the SDI on the one hand, and the day-to-day decisions and activities of society on the other. Developing an SDI has sometimes been seen as an end in itself. Therefore, given the limited financial resources available to governments, priority is given to supposedly more pressing activities without realizing the dependence of most of them on the availability of timely, accurate and reliable geoinformation resources. ECA has responded by seeking to integrate SDI policies into the very successful work on National Information and Communication Infrastructure (NICI) plans and strategies. This is still at the policy level and there remains a need for closer linkage between the geoinformation products and societal needs. Therefore, in keeping with global trends, the Commission is developing a guideline on Spatially-Enabled Government Services (SEGS) with experience in Selected African Countries. |
