The 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development held in Johannesburg recognised the need to ‘promote the wider use of earth observation technologies and GIS, to collect quality data on environmental impacts and land use changes’ in order to enable countries to more effectively manage their natural resources.

However, although many of the technologies for creating and handling digital geographic information are in principle available globally, in practice there are marked geographical differences in the levels of their adoption in different countries.

With funding from the RICS Education Trust, Neil Stuart, Duncan Moss, Paul Radikonyana and Bob Hodgart of the University of Edinburgh carried out a survey of GIS professionals in Africa to understand the factors affecting the present levels of use of geographic information systems (GIS) and underpinning technologies such as remote sensing (RS) and global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) in  Africa. 

What were the key findings? 

• the factor reported to be most limiting the wider use of GIS and related technologies was not hardware, software or data, but rather the limited human resource capacity, most notably a lack of trained staff;
• Whilst several small ‘islands’ of GIS activity with a critical mass of staff were found, in many African countries the practitioners reported being isolated in their organisation from wider GIS expertise. More needs to be done to allow GIS practitioners to share data, resources and ideas throughout Africa.
• Although a number of international initiatives are creating resources to assist GIS practitioners in Africa, the majority of respondents at the time of this survey were not making extensive use of the internet either for accessing GIS resources, or for professional networking