Kate Lance
Senior Scientist
United States Geological Survey/EROS Data Center
[email protected]
A few years ago, if one surveyed Africa to see how prevalent Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) initiatives were, one might have gotten a scanty response. But scratch a bit deeper, and a different story begins to emerge. SDI development has been plodding along, though at times with a different name.
The first inkling of SDI may have been efforts in South Africa to establish a National Land Information System in the mid-1980s. The initiative aimed to integrate data from different agencies, and although it was not successful at the time, it raised awareness for the need for data standards and inter-institutional coordination. It was not until the late 1990s that SDI firmly took shape as a distributed, standards-based, inter-agency framework, but just the same, the initial concepts were being explored nearly two decades ago on the continent.
As early as May 1991, specialists in Burkina Faso decided to create the National Environmental Information Program (in French, Programme National de Gestion de l’Information sur le Milieu, PNGIM) to act as a network to coordinate initiatives in data collection, processing, dissemination and updating. Similarly in Madagascar, 1991 is said to be the initiation for geographic information coordination. In 1991, the First Environmental Program included the management and popularization of the use of geographic information as one of its components.
In January 1998, the Namibian Directorate of Environmen-tal Affairs (DEA) of the Ministry of Environment and Tourism (MET), jointly with the Government of Finland, launched a four year national program (1998-2001) entitled Information and Communication for Sustainable Development (Infocom). The overall aim of Infocom is to promote sustainable development in Namibia through:
- Developing an effective Environmental Information Systems (EIS) Unit within MET;
- Developing communication mechanisms to disseminate environmental information.
The EIS Unit has established a metadata clearinghouse node (using the FGDC standard) and an OGC compliant web map service for the collaborative ‘Atlas of Namibia’ project; potential data users can download shapefiles directly from the web.
These initiatives, at the time they were getting underway, were not referred to as SDI, but ultimately they are basis of each country’s spatial data infrastructure. Other countries are breaking new ground as well (Table 1), with each initiative having a slightly different origin. Most are fairly recent and still in their infancy. A number of SDI advocates from regional and international organizations are actively facilitating SDI in Africa, and this may be a factor in the establishment of new initiatives. Furthermore, these advocates, such as EIS-AFRICA, U.N. Economic Commission for Africa, U.S. Geological Survey/EROS Data Center, International Steering Committee for Global Mapping, ESRI, FAO/Africover, Global Spatial Data Infrastructure Association, and the International Institute for Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC), are striving to coordinate their SDI capacity building efforts in the region to make better use of their human and financial resources. In doing so, they are able to have more impact than if each organization were to work alone.
