Many of these SDI initiatives have evolved out of specific projects, meaning that initially, the projects provided the impetus and funding. While it has been helpful to have such catalysts, the project approach raises issues of sustainability. A case-in-point is Ghana’s National Framework for Geospatial Information in Ghana (NAFGIM). NAFGIM got underway through the World Bank supported “Country-at-a-Glance” activity that brought together institutions to create a database of 11 themes as part of the Ghana Environmental Resources Management Project. To a large degree, the project drove the work, and when the project funding was exhausted, the inter-institutional collaboration and communication waned. Ghana, having established NAFGIM and seen it fade, is now in the process of exploring a more robust strategy for maintaining a national effort over the long term, with the recognition that short-term projects will come and go. Quite a few GIS-related development efforts in Africa have had a similar fate. One could argue that the projects focused too much on technical aspects and ‘getting something set up’, or sometimes, project staff have been ‘external’ to the government agencies that produced the data, based in a separate office. In either case, the critical institutional elements were not adequately addressed to prepare for when the project ended.
Fig 1 Screen shot of one of the Atlas of Namibia Map Service chapters.
Political Support of SDI
Although many African countries have a recognizable initiative, this is not to say that SDI is firmly on the political radar screen in Africa. In a region with high prevalence of poverty, HIV/AIDS, chronic droughts, flooding, and civil conflicts, ‘geographic information management’ can be viewed as esoteric to decision-makers. SDI champions routinely bemoan the lack of political support for their efforts.
SDI is a hard sell. It is a ‘beast’ of an initiative, since it requires inter-institutional, cross-sector, long-term coordination - something that defies the administrative and budgetary structures in Africa, as well as the donor agencies’ funding cycles. It also encompasses a range of technical, institutional, policy, and legislative components. Furthermore, SDI champions have the challenge of ‘proving’ that geospatial technologies are vital tools to support good government and economic decision-making in their respective countries. And to top it off, they must convey SDI in all its complexity in several, jargon-free sentences.
There are few examples where SDI has become a funded activity under the central government’s core budget. South Africa is one case; the National Spatial Information Framework (NSIF) is funded within the budget of the Department of Land Affairs. More common in Africa is the case of Zambia in which the central government supports an initiative in conjunction with donor funds; the Environmental Information Network and Monitoring System (EINMS) Forum which is a component of the Environment Support Programme is funded by the Government of Zambia, the World Bank, and the Nordic Development Fund.
In order to make a dent, SDI champions in Africa are figuring out how to insert geographic information coordination into the political landscape. They understand that the chance of obtaining funding for SDI directly is slim. So, instead, SDI components must be ‘tucked into’ poverty alleviation, decentralization, environmental monitoring programs, or whatever is prominently on the agenda.
