Financing the NGDI
Michael Blakemore
Professor of Geography, Department of Geography
University of Durham, Durham Dhi 3le, UK
Telephone: +44-191-374 4705
Email: michael.blakemore@durham.ac.uk
Introduction
What is needed to finance an NGDI?
- The simple answer is money.
More difficult questions include:
- How much money is needed?
- Where does the money come from?
- Who is best qualified to allocate and spend the money?
Then we come to really difficult questions such as:
- How is the NGDI to be related to wider information infrastructure policy?
- Is geospatial information really so important that it deserves a separate ‘infrastructure’ initiative?
- Is the national resource of information of a quality and comprehensiveness that makes it suitable for integrating into an infrastructure?
- Is the NGDI aiming to empower citizens with information, deliver better services, or both?
- Is the NGDI a government-only, or a multi-sector initiative?
- Should data standards be centrally imposed, or should data integration take place on an incremental basis using ad-hoc standards?
- Who are the primary users of the NGDI, and should they be expected to fund it?
With a contextual final question:
- Can we look to other NGDIs elsewhere in the world to identify successful funding models?
This discussion paper will review some of the funding and charging issues relating to the dissemination and use of geographic information around the world. It deliberately does not restrict the review to geographic information, and the issue of funding is set in wider debates about ‘citizen rights’ of access to government information. The intention is to cite literature that presents a variety of viewpoints relating to policy, information economics, and funding strategies.
Citizen rights and access to information
The demand for robust, reliable and timely data for development (whether it be social, economic, or whatever) is widely accepted. For example, the UK Minister for Overseas Development, Clare Short, argues that the statistical (and we can also read ‘geospatial’ here as well) capacity building is an essential component of the overall development process, and she warns that poor data lead to poor decisions:
Thirdly, the immediate need for key statistics, for instance for poverty monitoring, has led in some cases to ad-hoc, uncoordinated donor funding for data collection activities which lack critical mass. These have often failed to address effectively institutional and systemic problems and can distort priorities. This can fuel the vicious circle with donor-funded statistics and guestimates discouraging countries from investing in creating sustainable statistical systems. Much capacity has been built in the past which has been allowed to erode. (Short 1999)
To date much of the policy attention about ICT (Information Communication Technologies) in development has tended to concentrate more on the technologies than the information. IT donation projects have worked on an assumption that providing the IT ‘infrastructure’ may underwrite a process of technological improvement which in turn contributes to development. Commentators such as Atkinson note the very real infrastructure problems:
While ICT is spreading rapidly through developing countries - in 1995-98 developing countries connected more than 155m telephone lines, 105m mobile subscribers and 4m leased lines - the figures disguise a wide disparity between them and also with the north, where growth is even faster, opening up a huge and expanding digital divide between rich and poor nations. (Atkinson 2000)
and the IT focus is put into a wider context by Udombana who identifies organisational requirements such as an efficient public service. Such a service is best underpinned by an effective information strategy: