{"id":80022,"date":"2019-02-01T14:01:26","date_gmt":"2019-02-01T22:01:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/about\/newsroom\/?post_type=arcnews&p=80022"},"modified":"2022-08-29T11:22:32","modified_gmt":"2022-08-29T18:22:32","slug":"using-gis-to-revolutionize-development-from-egypt-to-the-rest-of-africa","status":"publish","type":"arcnews","link":"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/about\/newsroom\/arcnews\/using-gis-to-revolutionize-development-from-egypt-to-the-rest-of-africa","title":{"rendered":"Using GIS to Revolutionize Development, from Egypt to the Rest of Africa"},"author":1312,"featured_media":0,"menu_order":0,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"sync_status":"","episode_type":"","audio_file":"","castos_file_data":"","podmotor_file_id":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"","filesize_raw":"","date_recorded":"","explicit":"","block":"","itunes_episode_number":"","itunes_title":"","itunes_season_number":"","itunes_episode_type":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1561,10372,731],"tags":[311,591,1281],"arcnews_issues":[47032],"class_list":["post-80022","arcnews","type-arcnews","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economic-development","category-gis-hero","category-health","tag-data-driven","tag-humanitarian-relief","tag-visualization","arcnews_issues-fall-2017","arcnews_sections-gis-people"],"acf":{"short_description":"For Menghestab Haile, using GIS for food and nutrition security is only the first step in getting information into the hands of decision-makers.","pdf":{"host_remotely":false,"file":"","file_url":""},"flexible_content":[{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"For Menghestab Haile, GIS is about transforming development."},{"acf_fc_layout":"image","image":80032,"image_position":"right","orientation":"horizontal","hyperlink":""},{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"\u201cGIS will accelerate development\u2014if we can manage to make it understandable for decision-makers,\u201d he said.\r\n\r\nTo him, leaders are the key to precipitating progress. \u201cIf you really want to make a difference in a country or on a continent, you really need to have the decision-makers on board,\u201d he added.\r\n\r\nBut across Africa, where Haile has focused his career, many governments don\u2019t have the information they need to make informed decisions.\r\n\r\n\u201cSo you\u00a0[have to]<\/em>\u00a0link the right information with the right decision-makers at the right levels and with the right amount of detail,\u201d he said. \u201cFor me, that is what GIS does.\u201d\r\n\r\nAs the country director and representative for the World Food Programme\u2019s (WFP) Egypt Country Office, he is in a prime position to link leaders to GIS. And that is exactly what he is doing.\r\n\r\nWorking in partnership with Egypt\u2019s Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics (CAPMAS)\u2014which collects, processes, analyzes, and disseminates all statistical data in Egypt\u2014and Esri Northeast Africa (Esri NeA), Haile is leading the development of a Geospatial Platform for Food and Nutrition Security. But this is just where his vision begins.\r\n\r\n\u201cIt\u2019s not only a project,\u201d said Haile\u2019s colleague Alaa Zohery, a senior information manager associate of GIS at WFP and one of the engineers who helped build the platform. \u201cIt is an innovation. It is something really new.\u201d\r\n\r\nMuch of WFP\u2019s work in Egypt revolves around promoting good nutrition, and a lot of its projects focus on capacity building. Egypt\u2019s government has strong technical capabilities, but Haile noticed that ministries and other organizations were apprehensive about sharing their data\u2014including CAPMAS, which has the largest amount of and most authoritative data in Egypt.\r\n\r\n\u201cTheir biggest challenge was fear of losing control of their data,\u201d said Haile. So he enlisted Esri NeA to show CAPMAS how it could share its data while still protecting it.\r\n\r\n\u201cThrough that partnership, we basically built the confidence of the government that we were not exposing their data and\u00a0[that]<\/em>\u00a0they were in control of it,\u201d he said."},{"acf_fc_layout":"image","image":80042,"image_position":"center","orientation":"horizontal","hyperlink":""},{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"Now, CAPMAS is central to Haile\u2019s goal of getting information into the hands of decision-makers, starting with data on food security. The statistical organization currently houses its public-facing data on the geospatial platform, which officially launched in November 2016. And by the end of this year, Egypt will have released its first-ever paperless census on the portal. This means that anyone\u2014scientists, statisticians, researchers, and government staff members\u2014can access data from CAPMAS and the census and use it.\r\n\r\n\u201cCensus data usually takes two years to analyze before it is shared,\u201d said Haile. \u201cNow, it takes two months.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThe ultimate objective is to empower whole segments of society by disseminating the statistics and information and by improving this sort of dissemination using very attractive and very informative tools, such as GIS tools,\u201d explained one of Haile\u2019s key partners in this venture, Dr. Mohamed Ramadan, the research and development adviser to the president of CAPMAS.\r\n\r\nNow that the data and technology are in place for the geospatial platform, allowing anyone to analyze the drivers of food and nutritional insecurity, the next phase of the project is to get more government ministries involved in data sharing.\r\n\r\n\u201cWe have proved that we have the technology,\u201d said Haile. \u201cNow, we will create other portals for other ministries.\u201d\r\n\r\nEach portal will address the needs of the individual ministry. But by following a similar setup as the Geospatial Platform for Food and Nutrition Security, the team will ensure that the various portals are compatible. This will make it easier for the different ministries to work toward common goals, such as achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (the United Nations\u2019 current agenda for eradicating poverty and safeguarding the planet).\r\n\r\nAnd that gets to the heart of the project: to foster government-to-government linkages across Egypt and, eventually, share this model with other countries around Africa.\r\n\r\n\u201cI am demonstrating what can be done at a country level, which can be upscaled to other countries,\u201d said Haile.\r\n\r\n\u201cFrom the first time\u00a0[we talked]<\/em>, it was\u00a0[Haile\u2019s]<\/em>\u00a0point of view that we should share our experience with other countries, especially other African countries,\u201d said Ramadan. \u201cAnd we expressed our 100 percent readiness for that.\u201d\r\n\r\nHaile and his colleagues at WFP and CAPMAS have already hosted a delegation from Ethiopia that wanted to see how the paperless census was going to work. He has also targeted other countries\u2014including Nigeria, Cameroon, Mali, Malawi, and Botswana\u2014as the next batch of African countries that could revolutionize development by connecting their data to location and getting it in front of decision-makers.\r\n\r\n\u201cMy view is, if we work together, then we can work with the decision-makers at the biggest level\u2014at the African Union level,\u201d said Haile.\r\n\r\nWith his technical expertise in GIS and experience living and working in other African countries, it seems that Haile has been building up to this all of his professional life.\r\n\r\nOriginally from Ethiopia, he studied physics as an undergraduate and received his PhD in climate science from the University of Reading in the United Kingdom. While there, he was trying, as he put it, to figure out how to be useful in Africa.\r\n\r\n\u201cIn most places\u00a0[in Africa]<\/em>, you don\u2019t have observation on the ground,\u201d Haile said, because of geography, poverty, lack of infrastructure, conflict, and the like. So he decided to integrate satellite data with model-generated meteorological data and weather forecasts to make climate studies in Africa more feasible.\r\n\r\n\u201cI found that to integrate the satellite data with the model data, you needed GIS capabilities,\u201d he recalled.\r\n\r\nFollowing graduation, he worked at the university as a research fellow before returning to Ethiopia to use GIS to help the government modernize its early warning system, which monitors the climate, weather, and a country\u2019s food situation to predict drought and ward off famine. From there, he went to Kenya to help the Intergovernmental Authority on Development\u2019s (IGAD) member states strengthen their remote-sensing applications for food security early warning and environmental monitoring systems.\r\n\r\nHaile then made his move over to WFP, where he became the head of its Vulnerability, Analysis, and Mapping (VAM) unit in Sudan, helping the government build its technical capacity to monitor food security. Then he went to WFP\u2019s headquarters in Rome, where he led the GIS and remote sensing section of the VAM unit.\r\n\r\nFrom there, Haile went back to Ethiopia as the deputy director of WFP\u2019s Africa Office in Addis Ababa, where he focused on policy analysis, resource management, and again on capacity building.\r\n\r\n\u201cIt is here that I really saw the weaknesses that governments have,\u201d he recalled. \u201cBasically, you have decision-makers that\u2026don\u2019t have the information that is required to make informed decisions.\u201d\r\n\r\nWhen Haile got to WFP\u2019s Egypt office, where he spent two years as the deputy country director before becoming the country director, he was finally in a position to connect data directly to the leaders who need it.\r\n\r\n\u201cNow, I am a decision-maker and have the resources to say what we will focus on, while at the same time, I have the technical understanding to actually demonstrate how policy decision-making and technical capabilities can work together to help leaders deliver on their objectives,\u201d he said.\r\n\r\nHaile is trying to get governments to see that GIS is not a luxury.\r\n\r\n\u201cI want to make sure that GIS and data and remote sensing<\/a> are all part of\u00a0[government]<\/em>\u00a0budgets,\u201d he said, because he believes it is critical for governments to understand geography so they can fully comprehend what is affecting people in their countries and regions.\r\n\r\n\u201cBut a lot of leaders don\u2019t know that,\u201d he lamented, before adding: \u201cHere in Egypt, I am proving how important it is. All the ministers I talk to now want me to work with them.\u201d\r\n\r\nAnd Egypt wants to contribute its knowledge and know-how from the Geospatial Platform for Food and Nutrition Security project to the rest of the African continent. Which is certainly a win for Haile.\r\n\r\n\u201cThis is much bigger than me or than Egypt,\u201d he said. \u201cIn the end, we are talking about development transformation.\u201d"},{"acf_fc_layout":"sidebar","layout":"standard","image_reference":null,"image_reference_figure":"","spotlight_image":null,"section_title":"","spotlight_name":"","position":"Center","content":"Read other articles in the GIS Heroes<\/a>\u00a0series.","snippet":""}],"references":null},"yoast_head":"\nUsing GIS to Revolutionize Development, from Egypt to the Rest of Africa | ArcNews | Fall 2017<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"For Menghestab Haile, using GIS for food and nutrition security is only the first step in getting information into the hands of decision-makers.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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