CartONG was contacted in June 2019 by the Cooperation & Development Center of the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) to support the development of a GIS platform for local authorities in Argentina that EPFL was counselling. We provided mentoring on how to build the project requirements, identify risks and chose contractors, via two brainstorming workshops.

Learn more by reading our 2019 Annual Report.

CartONG a apporté un appui technique en cartographie et collecte de données à l'ONG locale YAAM Solidarité (association spécialisée dans la reconstruction de l'habitat à partir de matériaux locaux) dans le cadre d'un projet d'amélioration urbaine à Boassa - un quartier non loti situé à la périphérie de Ouagadougou.

Notre support technique a consisté en 2 phases principales :

1- création d'une carte de base de la zone à l'aide de la plateforme OpenStreetMap et du crowdsourcing

2- la collecte de données sur le terrain au moyen de solutions technologiques pratiques et faciles d'utilisation et d'une approche inclusive (incluant des ateliers de formation sur OsmAnd, OSM et Kobo Toolbox).

L'idée était de faciliter la réutilisation des cartes et des données et d'assurer leur durabilité à moyen et long terme. Les bénévoles de CartONG ont largement contribué au succès de cette mission, grâce au travail de cartographie effectué avant le déploiement au Burkina-Faso, ainsi que la communauté locale OSM qui a apporté un soutien essentiel sur le terrain.

Pour découvrir l'ensemble du projet, lisez notre actualité sur le sujet !

In 2018, CartONG conducted two challenging Information Management (IM) needs assessment missions, during which we evaluated the IM policies, processes, practices and tools implemented by the Solidarités International’s teams in response to the refugee crisis in Bangladesh as well as the Syrian crisis.

For these rapid assessments of information management needs, CartONG interviewed the key players to evaluate their expectations, fears and difficulties, and reviewed the existing documentation and processes in place for the IM tools used by the local Solidarités’ teams as well as the available IM products. As part of these missions, we also facilitated workshops and conducted a review of the key existing project documents to identify the IM needs per activity and the potential constraints related to donor requirements. The deliverables of these two needs assessments missions were a report and a list of recommendations and suggested priorities. The support provided by CartONG in the Middle East had the particularity of taking place following the launch of a new  consortium (therefore still in its infancy), and was thus mostly focused on strategic aspects; whereas the mission in Bangladesh was an opportunity to identify the capacity-building needs of the local IM team which then led to a two-week training mission on various topics such as MDC, mapping and data protection.

Eradicating poverty is hampered by unreliable or non-existent data and the lack of skills and incentives to use it. The Global Partnership on Sustainable Development Data (GPSDD) addresses this challenge by improving the effective use of data, filling key data gaps, harmonizing data specifications and architectures, expanding data literacy and capacity, increasing openness and leverage of existing data and mobilizing political will and resources. The GPSDD funded project “Building a Data Collaborative” sets out to do so in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Malawi and seeks to enable better targeted action towards reaching the health and WASH SDG targets.

The consortium

The Netherlands Red Cross is with its humanitarian data initiative 510 one of the front runners in promoting the use of data in the Red Cross movement. NLRC is the overall project manager, implementer in Malawi with the Malawi Red Cross and is responsible for the methodology, technical support and M&E.

CartONG is a French NGO supporting humanitarian and development actors with information management and data analysis, and promoting data sharing. CartONG works together with DRC’s OpenStreetMap community and Médecins Sans Frontières-Switzerland in DRC.

Approach

This project will create a Data Collaborative, a semi-formal, long term collaboration, that brings volunteer & technical communities (VTCs) and in particular OpenStreetMap communities, humanitarian and development organizations together with National Statistics Offices, businesses, and other civil society organizations.

The Data Collaborative will:

• Identify and address legal, technical and commercial barriers to data sharing.
• Raise awareness and build capacity of key stakeholders.
• Map currently available geospatial data on WASH & health SDG indicators, and identify gaps.
• Review data curation and dissemination platforms, develop workflows on data migration to/from them.
• Build tools and trainings on data visualization to make the data actionable to decision makers.

Simultaneously, the project will pilot a new methodology to monitor a specific set of SDGs indicators, (3.3; 3.8; 6.1; 6.2). The pilots in both DRC and Malawi will combine official with non-official data. This includes field mapping and remote, crowdsourced data collection (through the Missing Maps workflow).

To learn more about this data collaborative project and its lessons learned, check out the detailed news that was published following the end of the project.