GIS Education and Infrastructure Challenges and Problems in Emerging Countries

It is widely recognised that Geographic Information Systems (GIS) originated during the late 1960s in work at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design and the Federal Government inspired Canadian Geographic Information System. The technical environment of GIS is now, after thirty years of development, very sophisticated, facilitated by advancements in computer operating systems, computer graphics, database management, computer-human interaction, graphical user interface (GUI) design, and object-oriented programming methodologies. Parallel to these technical advances, there have been equivalent advances in the functionality of GIS, and connectivity has been bridged to other types of software, each with related yet distinct capabilities (e.g. remote sensing and image processing, computer assisted design and spatial statistics and modelling, among others). The costs of hardware have decreased significantly, largely through technical advances in the computing industry. GIS software prices have steadily fallen, albeit more modestly, while functionality continues to increase with every new release. Importantly, during this thirty year period, a digital information-based society has had time to evolve and flourish in developed countries. This snapshot suggests a GIS industry still undergoing a major growth phase, responding to universal needs for spatial information technology tools in resource management applications and various aspects and levels of land management and planning. There are, however, cracks on the landscape and it does not take much in the way of probing to find cavities, which, in some cases, are large enough to swallow the view that the needs of all users are being met. One such cavity concerns the use of GIS in developing countries also termed emerging countries, lower income countries, the `south' and, vicariously, the `third world'. There is little in the way of hard quantitative data available with which to assess the penetration of GIS into developing countries and to evaluate whether or not the adoption of this technology is successful and sustainable in these areas. Analysis of the latter has to reply on individual case studies and the former on ancillary sources. One such ancillary source is the last published biennial survey of international GIS and image processing (IP) use by the Global Resource Information Database (GRID) of the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP 1997). The 1997 GRID/UNEP survey reports 461,300 world-wide licensed users of GIS and IP software, representing an increase of over 100% since their 1995 survey. The 1997 percentage of licensed users, by continent, were: North America 71.1%, Europe 14.6%, Asia 6.7%, South America 4.1%, Australia 2.2%, and Africa 1.3%. Transactions in GIS, 1999, 3(4): 311±317