Last modified: 2016-07-29
Abstract
During the past few years much effort has been put into developing community-based methods to capture and analyze a large amount of data in a systematic manner. This new source of geo-referenced data could be very important throughout Africa where crowd sourcing activities or volunteered geographic information enhance participation and decision making based on local knowledge.
VGI has the potential to be a significant source of information for a variety of Web GIS applications, including real-time disaster monitoring and early warning. According to (Goodchild and Li, 2012), VGI has enormous advantages: it is free, can be timely and can provide types of data not previously utilized in mapping practice. There would be great benefit if its quality could be improved and assured.
This will especially help national mapping authorities to build and update their national geospatial datasets, and improve the availability and currency of the countries fundamental and thematic datasets. National Mapping Authorities should therefore consider this potential source of data to supplement and improve the coverage of their national mapping. Governments need to take proactive measures to develop strategies maximizing on the opportunity in the current technological development. This calls out the need to give close attention to developing strategic guidance on how to strengthen the communities’ participation in data collection.
As a first step, ECA conducted a Workshop on Community mapping in March 2013 to introduce the concept of Community Mapping, Crowd-sourcing and Volunteer Geographic Information (VGI), to discuss the methodology for mainstreaming VGI into national mapping programmes, the challenges and issues as well as the way forward to developing guidelines.
As a follow up activity ECA planned the development of guidelines for the best practices and principles for adopting the community mapping in the mapping practices in Africa. The background document is intended for discussion and serves as a stepping stone to the development of the guidelines. An expert group meeting is therefore held in Nairobi, Kenya to gather experts in the field to discuss on the issues and to develop a roadmap for the adoption of the technology and agree on the guiding principles.
The overall objective is to sensitize the national mapping agencies and to develop methodology for them to incorporate such community mapping into their national mapping programme. It aims to put forward the issues of VGI and review of best practices and current status on citizen participation in community mapping and to develop a roadmap for the adoption of the technology and agree on the guiding principles. The outcome of the meeting resulted in the framing of guiding principles for community mapping which is under review.
This paper therefore summarized the background of VGI in Africa and the efforts made so far.
Keywords
References
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