**Local Perspectives for MACGA to approach.**

**Comments made at the MACGA Planning Meeting, 27 May 2004.**

Alan Mills

GIS/Information Management Consultant

theNRgroup

110, Bow Road, Wateringbury, Maidstone, Kent, ME18 5DY; +44 1622 813214,
+44 7963 652911. alanpmills@thenrgroup.net

Good day everybody. First of all I would like to thank the MACGA
partners and Larry Tieszen and Jacob Opadeyi in particular for putting
together this vital forum and for giving me an opportunity to speak. I
hope everything I say is common sense and obvious to everyone. If it
isn't, we are in trouble. But even if it has already been said before,
it needs reemphasising now.

I have spent about fifteen years in development work, most of it in
Africa but the last 7 years in the region. It is a line of work full of
jargon but two of the most used phrases are Top Down and Bottom Up. Too
much development over the years has been Top Down; people at a regional
scale think they have the answers to everything and develop generic
solutions that have big impact globally but cause many problems at a
local scale; the Green Revolution was one, the Groundnut Scheme in
Tanzania was another. Recent years have seen a shift towards bottom up
approaches to development; especially from charitable foundations; small
scale projects focused at the community level. Think Global, Act Local
is the way we link all these small projects together to make it work.\
\
Regrettably, no matter what we do, we as GIS and Information Management
specialists are seen as top down. True there are some participatory and
community mapping schemes that exist, but generally mapping is a symbol
of authority and power, information feeds up to the bureaucracy, and
plans are a necessary evil to bring order to a country's governance;
putting everything in its place.

But even within its own smaller sphere of influence, we can define
approaches and attitudes to solving GIS problems as top down or bottom
up. A top down approach can be seen to be easy to get going, gets great
glory by being seen to have helped millions of people in loads of
countries, give out of the box solutions and leave it to the people on
the ground to sort out the inconvenient details that fit to local
conditions. But we only have to leaf through any library that keeps
development reports to see the same pattern; detailed planning and
involvement, lots of fact finding, then implementation and training
right at the end of the project and glib comments in reports that say
"local staff will follow through with the maintenance of the system" or
"more funding is necessary to ensure continuation". The reports gather
dust or are eaten by termites, and the process stops, there is no follow
up, maintenance or evaluation, until the next piece of funding appears
or a keen individual starts all over again. We cannot let that happen
with MACGA.

So what goes wrong? Well I would highlight two major problems that are
most pertinent to the Caribbean Islands; one is that not enough
attention is given to the differing priorities of each island; the
second is too little attention is paid to the existing structures,
institutions and capabilities of the islands.

To expand a little on the first; each state has to deal with a massive
number of priorities and juggle them, but the position of these issues
in the pecking order (politically, economically or socially) does
differ. In St Kitts or St Vincent it may be diversification away from a
monocultural agriculture at the top; in the BVI and Anguilla it may be
sustainable tourism development preserving the environmental product. In
Montserrat and Dominica, it may be more pertinent to talk of personal
and infrastructural vulnerability to natural disaster. All the countries
have *all* these issues to contend with, but they differ in the
proportion of time taken to address them. So a regional scale project
coming in and highlighting an issue which is important to them, must
realise that it may come way down that pecking order to the individual
country. Any involvement is at best politeness and more likely because
there is the chance to get important support (hardware, software) etc.
But the project has peripheral interventions in everyday office life in
that department, and as soon as the stimulus for action, i.e. the
consultant, disappears, the other priorities take hold once more. Any
organisational implementations, a managing committee, manuals, training,
are focused specifically on the particular application, and does not
take into account that the local individual left with the responsibility
to manage the project has to multitask, and these are just additional
duties.

The second is that not enough concern is given to the existing
structures of the departments that regional projects work with, and
their interactions with other parts of government, civil society and the
wider community. GIS in each country is not a one department thing, and
unless we help to organise all stakeholders into coherent GIS steering
groups, that can pool resources, share data and expertise, be a front to
the rest of their government and international projects, and have a
mandate to manage spatial data; all this software and technical training
might as well be thrown away. Fragmentary systems with inadequate, out
of date and inaccurate data duplicated in several departments is a
recipe for disaster. And the reason is that not enough effort is put
into people (human capital) and the departments, or institutional
capital.

All the GIS textbooks tell you that you need five components in GIS --
software, hardware, data, applications and people. We are good at the
first two as it is something tangible to show for effort. Data are
generally held better these days, particularly with the advent of
widespread metadata cataloguing. Applications, with the great assistance
of the software companies, is good but still needs more streamlining for
routine and extraordinary office processes. But people. We still see
training as the way to "build capacity". Once trained the technicians
can head back to their own islands and implement. What proportion of
technical GIS training actually gets implemented in each island?
Training is essential, yes, but without a supporting framework for
managing, publicising, maintaining, planning and implementing a total
GIS package, the training cannot be applied effectively. And although
there are a few really excellent people out there who have the technical
and organisational clout to think things through, often even they do not
have the time to do the necessary strategic planning. They are dragged
away to do other things.

From two years of working in BVI, I was amazed at the range of jobs I
had to field, and how I may be taken away from my desk at a moment's
notice to help with an oil spill, attend development control meetings,
take photos of a leatherback turtle laying eggs, give prizes at a school
event, even cooking 3000 pieces of chicken at Fisherman's Day. And in
between I had to think strategically for my division and department, and
sometimes the ministry, implement work programmes and then, when I
could, I looked at GIS issues. I was never just the GIS officer. How
many of those around the room can say they spend 100% of your working
time on GIS? 50%? Whatever MACGA comes up with it should not be a long
list of procedures, maintenance and updating that would take a full time
GIS department their lives to achieve, it must be simple, doable,
maintainable, and make these people's working lives easier. And the
biggest thing they could do is to facilitate that strategic thinking, by
having models or templates of how to structure your GIS, the data, the
organisation, the applications, the responsibilities, liability
statements and copyright guidance, data resale, and other legal issues.
I know so many GIS officers who are scrambling around trying to find out
how to do this between their other duties.

The fact is that the rest of the world are scrambling around too, and we
should not be afraid to think things through for ourselves in the
Caribbean. But the difference is that only a few of the countries in
this region have the critical mass of GIS experts to spare the time on
this, and I tip my hat, wherever it is, to those who have and are
achieving it; the long term efforts in Jamaica, all the activities in
Trinidad and Tobago, and Barbados, and Louis Potter in BVI I still
admire for sticking at the GIS game when others in government would have
had it pushed to the political periphery.

The lesson is that we have to be in this for the long term, and we have
to help each other to bring the islands who are not yet up to speed
alongside those with longer GIS histories. Our biggest challenge is
still one of perception not amongst ourselves but to our major clients,
the governments -- GIS is still seen by most as an expensive add on to
government business. We have to bring it into the core, to make people
see that to manage land, environment, vulnerability, utilities,
transport, jurisdiction, conflict resolution through planning,
management, monitoring and evaluation, GIS is the tool; no tool is the
wrong word, the framework, within which the whole government must
operate.

MACGA is the best attempt in regional GIS management I have seen. To
have us all here is superb, and I look forward to listening to more of
the honest experiences of people who have worked with these issues for
many years. MACGA needs to build on that substantial knowledge, not just
glibly "take it on board" but see how those experiences can be used
practically to build local capacity to take SDI forward throughout the
region, really learning the lessons from others' experiences.

*(Due to time limitations, the following could not be presented).*

My personal view is that they need to look at giving organisational,
strategic planning and managerial support to the creation of the SDI
frameworks in each country, not just give the technicians some training
and let them flounder with their other priorities and lose all that
momentum. They need to provide the support mechanisms, email groups,
helplines, discussion forums, not only establishing lines of
communications between nations and regional bodies, but between managers
and technicians in different states. Let them share their experiences,
show off the success stories, give tips on what to avoid. And every two
years, lets make sure that as many as possible meet for a conference,
such as the URISA one in September, so that we have an in built
measuring stick to see how far we have all got, a well-publicised united
GIS front in the region that has thought globally, but is acting
locally.

If we build these frameworks from the bottom up, from each government,
we can easily accommodate those regional priorities that can
automatically give CDERA, CCCCC, OECS, CARICOM, you name them, you can
supply them, with the summary reporting data, accurate and timely. If we
do it the other way round, those agencies reporting requirements will
sit uncomfortably with local priorities.

So where MACGA should focus is on providing organisational support in
each state, the regional agencies should help in defining simple,
repeatable needs for information and coordinate their other support
(hardware, software) effectively. The managers should fight for GIS to
take their central place in government business; the technical staff
should streamline and document their procedures and strive for good
quality datasets, and the rest of us should support every aspect of this
process, take every opportunity to shout it from the rooftops, and stick
with it until the job is done.