FOSS4G : Leave no one behind

It is under the moto "to leave no one behind" that the free and open source software for geographical information (FOSS4G) community met in Dar Es Salaam last week. 

For me and many of my colleagues from the CGIAR it was our first time to join this community as we tagged onto this conference for our annual meeting of the GIS specialist also known as the CSI, no not crime scene investigation but consortium for spatial information! Many of us have actually started migrating to open source software for GIS some years ago, and we were quite exited to learn more about this community.

the stairs

For the FOSS4G crowd it was their first conference held on the African continent, and for many oversees participants a very first introduction to the developing world. A great effort was made to make the conference accessible to the local community in Tanzania and East African Region, with stipends and engaging the huge local tech community. Despite of that, the average participant was male and white, and no one could really apprehend that I am a white woman yet working and living in Nairobi.

Yet conference show cased many great East African tech initiatives and companies, from the humanitarian open street maps, to WeRobotics flying labs, showing that Africa does not lag behind when it comes to tech application with open source that solve local problems. 

Minister January Makamba

The conference was opened by January Makamba, minister in the government of the United Republic of Tanzania responsible for the environment and the Union. He had a great speech, which major message was “If geospatial tools and data do not serve humanity; then they are simply toys”. He made a great start putting African technology and development at the center of his speech. I even managed to shake his hand, pitch him my tool (and not my toy!) that helps local communities to make better livestock plans and raise his attention to ILRI work in Tanzania. It was a great moment.

Dar view from the ferry from Zanzibar

During the conference i attended many presentations from the non-academic world, from the geeks who develop the codes behind Qgis, to advanced web management for GIS or humanitarian open street maps. It was a big eye opener even if sometimes i felt like an alien in the world of hard core coders. 

In the up-coming weeks i will share some more insights from this conference so stay posted! 

Nile Goblet a new open source tool for suitability analysis applied to rainwater management in the Ethiopian Blue Nile

This is my 100st post on my blog, and I kept this magic number to introduce the Nile Goblet tool to you, an open-source GIS solution, which is also the major output my two years work in Ethiopia.

Suitability analysis is a procedure within the geographical information systems (GIS) that identifies location where a given practice or technology is suitable. It is therefore an important tool for targeting  interventions on the ground and develops context specific policies.

The Nile-Goblet tool is an open source GIS software that allows to perform suitability maps easily without any prior GIS knowledge once the database is ready. Policy maker and practitioners can input their knowledge about a given practice/technology and learn from their maps. Because the mapping procedure is very transparent, users will understand and trust the resulting maps. Hopefully this understanding will allow to policy makers to move away from blanket approaches, and practitioners involve with communities based on a set of option based on scientific knowledge that fit the context.

The user interface of the Nile Goblet tool

Databases can be create for micro watershed, basins/regions or countries. New maps can be added to the tool in ascii format with WGS84 geographic coordinate system. The manual coming with the tool show how to prepare new layers in ArcGIS software or in Grass, an open source GIS software (http://grass.osgeo.org/) . 

This tool has been developed for the Nile Basin Challenge Program (www.nilebdc.org) and for the Ethiopian context, where best practices for rainwater management are well known. Nonetheless the adoption of many of these practices are still low, mainly because they have been promoted in location where they are not suitable, or have not been combined with synergistic practices that would result into real benefits for farmers. Rainwater management practices therefore need to be combined at landscape scale to form rainwater management strategies. To fit the need of integrated watershed management, the Nile Goblet tool also allows to combine practices at landscape scale.  

The suitability map for mango created in the Nile Goblet tool

The tool comes with a database, that includes all the freely available layers for the Nile relevant to water management, as well as  a sample of rainwater management practices which suitability has been based on the “integrate participatory watershed management guidelines” from the ministry of agriculture (check the guidelines https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B_BdeBrudKuydlN6WHVzSGE2aXc and https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B_BdeBrudKuyZjlRVHhYNEN6NjQ)

The tool has been tested during several trainings and learning event and the major key players in water management in Ethiopia could be reached out. All trainings were overbooked, and most participants have welcomed the tool with great enthusiasm. Time will show if it will truly be taken up!

You want to test the tool yourself: check it out under output and material.

Check out the NBDC blog post about this tool http://nilebdc.org/2012/12/18/thematic-working-group-technological-innovation-hosts-its-first-learning-and-training-event-for-the-benefit-of-the-whole-national-platform-on-land-and-water-management/

Open source GIS : it it really what stakeholders in the developing world want?

In Ethiopia, where rainwater management is often still promoted as "blanket approaches" (these are approaches that do not take the specific context into account), producing suitability or feasibility maps that show where the biophysical and socioeconomic criteria for successful adoption are met is essential. Most policy-maker, researchers and extension services have little access to GIS technology and lack in GIS knowledge. For this reason Nile Basin Development Challenge program (the project i am working on) is working on an open source GIS tool that allows to do the suitability mapping without any prior GIS knowledge.

The participants in Addis

The last two weeks, i have been giving a training on the beta version this GIS tool in Addis and Gondar. In addition of simple manipulations, we also taught participants how to feed their own maps. The maps need to be in a GIS software, we offered the possibility to do this preliminary work in ArcGIS (the most common commercial GIS software, which license costs about 1400 USD per year) and Grass, an open source solution. The trainings were based on competence based training approach, letting participants discover the tool and GIS software on their own. The trainings went well, participants seemed to enjoy the training, and at the end almost everyone understood the stories behind geographical coordinate systems (taking the earth as a ball) and the projected coordinate systems (for which the world is "made flat").

The participants in Gondar

 Representing an official organization funded by the world bank, I cannot provide pirated software. So each participant who wanted to use ArcGIS had to request a personal trial license from ESRI (the company providing ArcGIS). It is a pretty cumbersome process, which needs internet. (As in Ethiopia most organisation work with static IP,  each laptop had to be programmed separately). Despite of this whole hassle all participants in the Addis chose to use ArcGIS, and only 2 advanced GIS user in Gondar took up the challenge to test Grass. Most of the evaluation were very positive about the training, but the major complaint was that we did not teach sufficiently ArcGIS.

the computer room in Gondar where every laptop has to be configured manually to access internet

 (static IP)

I am wondering why everyone wants to learn so much about ArcGIS, and why there is so little interest among my partners and stakeholders for open-source solutions. Is this the widely spread availability of pirated software? Is it the fear to not being mainstream? is it the fear to not get support when things don't work? or is it the ease and user-friendliness of ArcGIS that allows you to make tools even when you don't understand what your are doing?

For whatever reason, open-source software still has a lot of promotion work to do in the developing world... the NBDC open-source tool is now in revision, some new features will be added and some bugs removed. When it will be finished, we will promote it broadly and see if at least this tool can be used by our stakeholders. The tool will also make available a whole bunch of geographical layer, that otherwise are difficult to access in a country with weak internet access. Maybe this could be a good reason for stakeholders to overcome their fears and doubts about open-source...

The most admired participant : the duck that participated in 2 trainings : "if you don't train GIS you will be like the duck, you have a certificate but can't map anything :-)

A story to follow up...
the link to the beta version of the tool can be found under material and output : http://catherinepfeifer.blogspot.com/p/materials-and-outputs.html 

and find here the link to the official NBDC blog about this training :
http://nilebdc.org/2012/11/23/gis-training-in-addis-ababa-and-gondar-testing-the-beta-version-of-the-nile-goblet-tool/ 

the desperate need for more Geographical Information System

In Ethiopia and many other countries in the world, many agricultural policies are promoted as sort of "blanket" approaches, despite of the fact that agriculture is crucially location specific, driven by soil, rainfall and temperature. One way of getting more location-specific in policies is to be able to manage and analyze data in a spatial way with so called Geographical Information Systems (GIS). The increasing need for GIS is now recognized, at least in my project for which I gave a GIS training a the regional agricultural research institute in Bahir Dar. 

Introduction to GIS given by the trainers from the reseach institute

Participants learning how to use a GPS

Participants puzzled by one of 

exercises

Participants were coming from the local research centers, were relatively young and above all enthusiastic about learning how to use this seemingly complicated program called ArcGIS. It was so hard to push people out of the computer room and convince them to go for lunch (this despite of the fact that we had booked the Lake Shore resort, one of the nicest place in town). Every participant felt so privileged to be allowed to learn how to use GIS...

During my stay i also met people from GIZ (the German development cooperation). One of their objective is to delineate watersheds and work in close collaboration with the agricultural bureaus. They also got the task to train 190 people on GIS. 

Finally, I met a student in her second year in land planning. Each program like that in Europe would start with an introduction to GIS, but she did not know what I was talking about.

The view from Lake Shore Resort, a small paradise on earth to forget about GIS for the lunch hour...

At the end of my two week stay in Bahir Dar, i just realized that people start to understand the urgency of understand how location matters and create a huge demand for GIS in the area. A demand is too big to be addressed overnight. But there is an obvious need to make GIS training available and affordable to people. Therefore, the partner I have been working with for the GIS training will continue training more people based the developed training and build up a pool of trainers. In this manner, the training will not depend on me, a foreigner anymore, but fully passes in the hand of local partners and hopefully this initiative will spread GIS knowledge around Ethiopia. 

But one question stays : why are we still teaching ArcGIS which license costs about 1400 dollar per year, when we could teach open source software (free software)? This is mainly because our partners wish to be trained on ArcGIS and probably lack of information about open source software.

I recently met a young man, campaigning for open source GIS teaching open source GIS for almost for free. He is running an NGO to increase GIS knowledge in Africa http://www.mappingacrossborders.org/. 

In the end, the software does not matter as much as the fact that there is a huge need for understand what spatiality means and how we can come up with more location specific knowledge. Both my training, and the training offered by mapping across borders is just a drop of water on a hot stone...