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IV. STRATEGY
IV.1. BASIS OF THE STRATEGY
1. Focus on AFRICA needs : A geographic preference
18. EIS-AFRICA will focus on the needs of Africa as a whole. The geographic scope of EIS-Africa extends beyond that of the EIS Program. The North African countries will also be covered. The countries as beneficiaries of the activities of EIS-Africa encompass the communities of people living together, the governmental institutions, the NGOs and private sector partners. Are also considered the ecosystems in all their biological diversities.
19. Consequently the target of EIS-Africa in every country will be not only the governmental agencies, but also the civil society. A national EIS is seen by EIS-Africa as a tool that should be used by the decision/policy makers, but also by the ordinary citizen to have access to the environmental information he/she needs. In most countries, this access to environmental information is a fundamental right conferred by the constitution. Allowing the countries and sub-regional institutions to satisfy this fundamental right, geared to sustainable development planning and management needs is the reason of EIS-Africa to exist. In every country where EIS-AFRICA will be active, the EIS/GIS community of professionals will also be targeted. EIS-Africa will offer an opportunity to the professionals of the geoinformation sphere on the continent to get organized and propose solutions to their professional difficulties in areas like training, promotion and fair recognition of the profession by the employers. 20. Based on the experience of the EIS Program showing that some environmental issues arise or are best perceived from a sub-regional view point, EIS-AFRICA will devote special attention to Africa specific sub-regions, as defined within institutional settings or political boundaries, and also to natural ecosystems. As mentioned above for the countries, EIS-Africa will facilitate the exchange of information between sub-regions on the use of environmental information in sub-regional environmental management, planning, and policy coordination.
21. Meeting environmental information needs at continental level is also an area of interest to EIS-Africa. The experience of the EIS Program shows that an increasing number of initiatives are emerging that are demanding on continent-wide environmental information. The Global Environment Outlook, the Global Spatial data Infrastructure, the Committee on Development Information (CODI) of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) are a few examples. A spatial database integrating socioeconomic data with geophysical data on the continent is often requested (Africa Information Society Initiative). In this regard the Africa Data Sampler mentioned above could be an input in the process of setting up such a tool, not forgetting the continent-wide data sources of institutions like UNEP, WRI, the World Bank, ECA, etc. The challenge in meeting this type of need is the capacity to aggregate quantitatively and qualitatively the relevant data and to generalize the corresponding spatial data as to fulfil the synoptic requirement of the continental view.
22. Focusing on Africa is both a natural preference for an African organization, and a duty if the big gap existing between this continent and the others is to be bridged. In summary, the volume of African needs for environmental information, be it for individual information purposes, for country leaders or decision makers, for sub-regional entities or for regulating the management of the environment for the whole continent, and the needs of the geoinformation management professionals in Africa is the first pillar of EIS-Africa.
2. The Network: an heritage to expand
23. The high potential and strength of EIS-AFRICA is in the network of institutions and EIS professionals inherited from the EIS Program, and spread over the continent, and abroad.
Institutions involved in the EIS Program can be seen in four groups, ranging from national institutions to these of international audience:
- at national level the membership of the EIS-Program includes national environment agencies, geoinformation centers, private sector, research institutions, etc.
- sub-regional institutions include for example the AGRHYMET Center of Niamey in Western Africa, the SADC EIS Centre of Harare in Southern Africa, the Regional Centre for Mapping of Resources for Development(RCMRD) of Nairobi in Eastern Africa;
- among continental level organizations can be listed the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), Addis Ababa, the African Organization for Cartography and Remote Sensing (AOCRS), ALGIERS , the Network for Sustainable Development in Africa (NESDA), Abidjan.
- the international community is present through institutions like WRI, USAID, the World Bank, UNEP, OSS/UNITAR, UNDP, UNSO, UNESCO, GRID Arendal, GTZ, ITC, , etc.
- EIS professionals involved in the EIS Program include a variety of specialists in GIS and Remote Sensing with a wide range of professional backgrounds (Mapping, Environment, Geology, Photogrammetry, Economy, Agronomy, Statistics, economy, social sciences, etc.)
25. The other reason explaining the presence of the EIS Program throughout SSA is the amount of activities undertaken in the countries covered during the life time of the Program: These can be grouped in three categories: (1) activities at country level (2) activities at sub-regional and (3) activities at continental level.
- As indicated earlier, the EIS Program contributed in generating awareness about the benefits of GIS Technology (including Remote Sensing) applied to environmental management. African countries engaged in National Environment Action Plans (NEAP) used directly or indirectly the opportunity of the EIS Program to initiate an environmental information management component within their NEAP's. Some of them developed with the support of the EIS Program data integration capacity at national level (Ghana, Benin, Senegal, Uganda, Zimbabwe). In the case of Benin, in cooperation with OSS/UNITAR a full Internet-based environment information and monitoring system (SISEI), with the required institutional framework. Other countries are currently going through this process either with the World Bank's "country at a glance" approach or following the SISEI approach (Côte d'Ivoire, Burkina Faso, The Gambia, etc.). Case studies highlighting best practices in the domain of environmental information management at country level we re developed by the EIS Program in Senegal, Uganda and Zimbabwe with the support of GTZ.
- The EIS Program also developed activities at sub-regional level: These include various regional workshops organized to generate awareness or build capacity in data management. A regional workshop organized by the World Bank and UNDP, and aimed at regional thinking embedding into national environment policies, in Central West Africa (Yamoussoukro, Côte d'Ivoire July 1996), was used by the EIS Program as a platform to sensitize decision makers and introduce the need to incorporate environmental information management into these national policies, as a way of facilitating cross boundary and regional environment management. Initiatives. Another typical example is the West Africa sub-regional workshop (Accra, Ghana, January 1998) funded by UNEP and that allowed national experts from the sub-region to discuss the issues of data standards and harmonization, and formulate recommendations to their various countries. Recently, the EIS Program initiated a series of activities aimed at facilitating projects or programs and coordinating actions with other networks in Africa. In this area, it offered its 14th conference of March 1999 in Ouagadougou as a platform and its constituency as source of knowledge to the West Africa regional office of IUCN (BRAO) to organize discussions on the initiative of publishing a series of regional State of the Environment (SoE) reports on West Africa. Later, the EIS Program got involved in subsequent regional workshops organized to finalize this project and get it endorsed by the community of West African countries, with the support of UNEP. The EIS Program also facilitated and helped develop a WRI initiative in the framework of the Information Working Group, consisting of supervising the development of country case studies on policy dialogue and GIS analysis impact on environment policies in West Africa, using the Gambia, Burkina Faso and Cote d'Ivoire as sites of the case studies. The EIS Program is also involved in the Sahelian countries initiative of building up a regional desertification information systems over West Africa and Chad with the support of ITU, OSS/UNITAR, CILSS and ECOWAS. The Southern Africa Development Community through its EIS initiative gave an opportunity to the EIS Program to contribute to this Sub-region through various activities. The Program is also active in direction of the IGAAD community in Eastern Africa.
- This role of facilitation, from a continental point of view extended to the AfricaGIS initiative which gathered regularly since 1993 (Tunisia) the Geoinformation world on the African continent, successively in Abidjan (1995), Gaborone (1997 and Accra (1999). Beside its contribution to these events, the EIS-Program, since AfricaGIS'99 plays the role of Secretariat for this biennial event. In the same continent-wide context, the EIS Program is active in the FRAME Contact Group set up by USAID. The first meeting of the Contact Group in Saly Portudal (Senegal May 2000) benefited from the input of the EIS Program in view of refocusing USAID assistance to SSA countries in the domain of urbanization and environment.. Along the same line, the Program contributed in June 1999 to the first meeting of the Committee on Development Information (CODI), an initiative of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa replacing and extending in scope the former United Nations Cartographic Conferences for Africa. Finally, the EIS Program is associated with the Africa Spatial Data Infrastructure initiative, as a component of the Global Spatial Data Infrastructure (GSDI) program and discussions are underway in view of extending the role of the EIS Program in this globe-wide program. It is important to note at this point that all these continental level initiatives are facilitated by the availability of a product offered to the African community by the partners of the EIS Program some years back (WRI, WCMC, DCW) in the form of a compilation of spatial data on a CD-ROM, very useful for global analysis purposes, and as a baseline for updating information on physical resources on the continent.
3. Modern TECHNOLOGY: A great opportunity to take
27. It is well known that Technology, associated with Science is a source of progress in all domains. Information Technology in particular provided certainly the most significant contribution of modern technology to socioeconomic development during the last three decades. Collecting the relevant data, analyzing them using appropriate hardware and software and deriving accurately the relevant information for decision making is a great achievement of this end of millenium. Based on the same principle, Environmental Information Systems use Information Technology to provide ways to addressing environmental issues: GIS technology, aerial and spatial remote sensing, image processing, positioning systems, computer science, modern information and communication technology are the main components of the technology to be used as the third pillar of EIS-Africa.
28. EIS-AFRICA will use Technology, in an appropriate way to reach its goal, and its performance will depend on its capacity to adopt modern technology, to adapt to its evolution and revolutions, and to adapt its use to the context of the continent. Indeed, the performance of EIS-Africa will also depend on its success in using modern technology to capture and make use of the wealth of African knowledge disseminated in the variety of civilizations characterizing this continent, first home of mankind. All this entails a constant monitoring of progress in the above mentioned technological areas, and updating of knowledge within the network, using facilities and mechanisms involving the GIS industry, the research and training partners within the network and outside of it. It entails also the involvement of the local communities in the design of tools and the selection of processes.
29. But the recourse to modern technology is not an end per se. It will be used as an instrument facilitating the development of the required tools and information products for meeting the needs of African countries and sub-regions in environmental management for sustainable development. Therefore, developing applications will be a target for EIS-Africa partners throughout the continent, with distribution facilities allowing all the parts of Africa to exchange information and processes derived and developed within the network.
30. The following diagram shows the cycle of operations envisaged by EIS-Africa for putting its strategy at work:
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