My story in Tanzania starts in 2004 when I arrived in Arusha to work for with Tanzania Wildlife Research Institute through a project with the Norwegian Peace Corpse and Dept of Biology with NTNU, Trondheim. I was lucky enough to end up a place where we had good access to data - but far from perfect.

In general the available data were fair. There are however several problems with the spatial data:

• Lack of information about the projection
• No history of changes
• Information about the origin of the data were lacking
• Changes are not documented well enough
• Ownership of the data were unclear

You can't solve these types of problems from a single desk. The wheels we need to set in motion belong on a technical level and connect all the way up to the political level in a country. In Tanzania the legal system with the Environmental Management Act on paper represents a fine start for organising environmentally related information. Putting it all into practice is, however, a challenge.

http://www.lead-journal.org/content/07290.pdf

This act points towards the citizens right to access information. Under general principles 2.7.3 it says:


This is where it starts with a reasonable law stating that a citizen should have access to environmental information. What really matters in the years to come is the ability for the different stakeholders to work together to make data available.

Spatial data infrastructure is an interesting field and I hope we will see a lot of development in the years to come! Should any of the readers of this very short article have suggestions or ideas on what is happening then please comment or indeed write articles of your own. The floor is yours!