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Your organization collects data every time a team goes to the field, but is this data fully utilized, or is it lost within a PDF document? Would you like to visualize your NGO’s core information on a map in order to get a better sense of where the needs are and, therefore, to plan your activities accordingly? Do you want to implement a new activity but only have the name of the village and are unsure where that village is?
The saying “a picture is worth a thousand words” could not apply better than to GIS applications: using a map, you can visualize at a glance where needs are and where resources are, and then to analyse how best to link the two. Having a geographic overview of a situation can dramatically improve evidence-based decision-making. From printed base maps (where infrastructure data provides a good overview of a region) to sector-specific dynamic maps (to quickly visualize the evolution of a situation through time), geographic information is vital for a good understanding of a situation. In order to be able to produce maps, you need to find the existing geographic data and ensure your sector data is in a usable format. You also need to conduct analysis relevant to each sector. A GIS strategy allows you to define standard procedures that optimize workflow and ensure that GIS products reach the people who require the information. CartONG assists humanitarian organizations in their GIS work with any or all of these steps.
Learn more about how CartONG can help you with your GIS and mapping projects below:
You can also visit the Information Management and Capacity building pages as they are related.
CartONG and Action contre la Faim have signed a 3-year partnership agreement to further their collaboration. The partnership agreement that will run from 2020 to 2023 details the general principles of collaboration between our two organizations around common goals and mutual commitments as well as more operational aspects.
In particular, it aims to develop the use of cartographic products within Action Contre la Faim by making CartONG’s mapping service available to ACF’s operations. In particular, our team of cartographers will be able to provide emergency support to ACF in the event of a humanitarian crisis, in what is called “rush mode format” as we can already do for other partners such as MSF or ACAPS.
More generally, this partnership also aims to provide ACF's teams with better support in the area of program data management (or Information Management), either through capacity building for their teams or strategic advice and support.
CartONG is participating, on behalf of the French Development Agency, to the scientific impact evaluation of the PRIQH2 project implemented by the Tunisian Rehabilitation and Urban Renovation Agency (ARRU). This evaluation is co-lead by the United Nations University and BJKA consulting. CartONG brings its expertise in GIS and spatial analysis of urban evolution to the table.
During the first of implementation (2019), CartONG implemented the following activities:
Learn more about this project by reading our article and by reading our 2019 Annnual Report.
The "Strengthening CSOs' Information Management" project aims to professionalize French-speaking Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) in the use and implementation of methods, tools and processes related to the different stages of the data analysis chain.
Co-financed by AFD for 3 years (early 2020 - late 2022) and implemented with the support of 10 partners, this project will make it possible for CartONG to continue its work in support of the sector by promoting the pooling and dissemination of new resources, both practical (tools, tutorials, training modules, etc.) and strategic (studies, etc.) to all humanitarian and development actors.
In alphabetical order, the 10 partners of the project are:
Learn more about this initiative by reading our introductory article to the project.
CartONG, in consortium with MapAction, has been selected by UNICEF for a long-term agreement, to provide GIS & IM support to their operations around the world from 2020 to 2022. We will be activated by country offices to provide support on the following topics:
We will try to use these activations to build shareable resources in collaboration with MapAction.
The RESILAC (Inclusive Economic and Social Recovery of Lake Chad) project and consortium identified during its start-up phase the need to improve the management of its information (also called Information Management or IM). CartONG is supporting Groupe URD in charge of the operational M&E system (système de suivi et d'évaluation des réalisations) on the information management component.
In 2019, CartONG conducted a diagnostic in information management (all combined technologies) in order to formalize the needs of stakeholders, identify existing constraints and opportunities and propose solution scenarios.
Following this diagnosis, CartONG continues to support the RESILAC project teams in 2020 and 2021 in the implementation of certain recommendations: design of a dashboard to help monitor and manage the project, design of a database at the level of individual beneficiaries to centralize the support provided by the project through these various activities, distance training to the teams in data management etc.
As part of a Bioforce project aiming at strengthen local capacities to work for the resilience of populations and crisis response in Central African Republic (CAR), CartONG is supporting Bioforce to provide structural strengthening of the Permanent Secretariat of NGOs (SPONG) in CAR.
This support-advice mission, carried out following an information management assessment that took place in 2019, and initially planned via a field mission (canceled due to the Covid 19 crisis), was carried out completely remotely. Its objective was to provide technical support for the operationalization of the Excel databases of the SPONG as well as to support the SPONG teams in the use of the mapping tool QGIS to establish 3W maps.
As part of this new collaboration, CartONG will develop an interactive web map for ECPM - a French NGO who advocates for the abolition of death penalty wolrdwide - to display the status and key statistics on death penalty in each country of the world. The map will be built on a custom platform using Vue.js libraries. Additionally, CartONG will support ECPM in structuring the dataset to ensure smooth interaction between the data and the web map.
Following the success of the data collaborative project in the Democratic Republic of Congo organized in 2017-18 by CartONG and OpenStreetMap-DRC on health-related data, a similar initiative is being launched in 2019 on Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) data.
This project is being launched with the support of the Agence Française de Développement (AFD), following the PILAEP 2 project (Promotion of Innovative Modalities for Access to Drinking Water), which aims to set up sustainable drinking water supply systems for populations in the suburban districts of Kinshasa and Bas Congo not served by the national water supply authority.
The PILAEP 2 project, in collaboration with several partners including the DIAL laboratory and the INS-RDC, has enabled significant data collection and analysis work (particularly for evaluation purposes in a results-based management approach). In order to ensure that access and updating of this data is sustainable, particularly for local actors, AFD wanted to support a sustainable collaboration approach in the DRC and Kinshasa in particular.
The objective of this approach will be to establish an inventory of actors, data and barriers in order to encourage sharing, and to work together to analyse these data. To this end, stakeholders will be encouraged to rely on existing resources within their various organizations, public authorities, but also open data platforms and in particular OpenStreetMap. A pilot field mission will also be organised to test, with interested partners, the methodologies developed together. The provisional timeframe:
In 2019:
The data collaborative initiative on WASH data started in November 2019 with a kick-off workshop that gathered 28 participants from 14 organizations (international & local NGOs, UN representatives, donors and government agencies) in Kinshasa. This workshop allowed us to define the plan of action and objectives for 2020 with the organizations interested by this new project.
CartONG is supporting AFD in their adoption of maps as decision-making tools for an "integrated territorial approach" in the Sahel three-frontier conflict zone (Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso). It includes reworking their data model and process for capturing information on the activities that they finance, as well as the production of maps; support on the data collection tools, and training of AFD teams on the templates produced.
This project aims at supporting Atlas Logistique in their logistics services and supply chain management for humanitarian organizations in Democratic Republic of the Congo. More specifically, we will be working together on defining and producing the necessary mapping products and associated data collection tools relative to logistical needs and vulnerabilities in terms of supply chain and of logistical accessibility in Kinshasa and North Kivu.
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