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II. SCOPE OF EIS-AFRICA
EIS-Africa will be a network of institutions and individuals providing a framework for assisting African countries in
- assessing their priority needs with respect to the management of information on the environment, natural resources and sustainable development
- developing technical and strategic capacity to meet these priority needs.
8. EIS-AFRICA will take the action of the EIS Program further. Indeed, throughout the continent, countries benefited from the activities of the EIS Program. It helped African leaders and information experts to become aware of the possibilities for developing and using environmental information. As of 1999, almost every African country has established an EIS program, most of these being located in government offices, with the aim of meeting information needs for decision making in the framework of National Environmental Action Plans. To take an example, the emergence of national geoinformation centres in Africa was largely facilitated and promoted as the result of early consultations among experts during the EIS Program’s meetings. A typical case is the “Comité National de Télédétection et d’Information Géographique (CNTIG)” of Côte d’Ivoire. Similarly, existing centres developed into geoinformation management area thanks to the technological and advisory influence of the EIS Program. An example is the national mapping agency of Burkina Faso, the “Institut Géographique du Burkina (IGB)” where a special unit called the “Unité de Traitement de l’Information Géographique (UTIG)” was set up as the starting point for developing geoinformation activities, under the guidance of GIS experts part taking in the activities of the EIS Program. Similar examples can be taken from The Gambia where an EIS Program was developed and an EIS Center set up within the National Environmental Agengy (NEA), with the contribution of the EIS Program, the World Bank and UNSO. Sénégal, Uganda, Madagascar, Ghana, Benin are a few additional examples of countries where operational geoinformation centres, set up or expanded into the geoinformation management area contribute effectively to a better environment management, as the result of being among the first African institutions to take part in the activities of the EIS Program.
9. Through EIS-AFRICA, we want to:
- achieve mainstreaming of environmental information into the decision making processes in the context of sustainable development in Africa
- develop the operational capabilities of the continent-wide EIS network built around the EIS Program to set up and efficiently use EIS's in Africa as an imperative component of the sustainable development infrastructure;
- strengthen EIS capacity in African countries internally, in the context of enhancing the quality and accountability of decision making, and extend this capacity to all the other African countries where such capacity is not existing;
- use national EIS capacities to extend into addressing the pending sub-regional and continental EIS issues. Data harmonization is one of these issues hampering a spread use of spatial environmental data in areas like regional SOE reporting, regional EIA studies, trans-boundary watershed management planning, etc. Other issues, such as environmental data and information policy, need to be addressed in order to contribute to an easy access to environmental data and use thereof;
- at operational level, help countries and institutions achieve the maximum profitability of environmental management projects, through reduction of time spent on initial data location and collection, for appraisal and formulation, accurate analysis during implementation, and easier post project evaluation;
- facilitate donor countries, development cooperation agencies and scientific institutions from the North, to reach their target in African countries and sub-regions in the area of environment and natural resources management;
- harmonize and complement the actions undertaken in the wide domain of environment in Africa, by developing partnership and building close relationship with similar existing sister organizations like the Network for Environment and Sustainable Development in Africa (NESDA), Managing the Environment Locally in Sub-Saharan Africa (MELISSA), to name just a few;
- extend the geographic coverage of the EIS Program beyond Sub-Saharan Africa to reach all the African countries.
- create new professional opportunities and career incentives for African EIS and geomatics experts through an increased role of NGO’s and the private sector on the African EIS market.
- contribute to the development of national and continental spatial data infrastructures in Africa in partnership with the Global Spatial Data Infrastructure (GSDI) initiative.
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