Map Africa 2010

Africa - a continent of large reservoir of natural resources, great trade opportunities, multi-cultural population and willingness to adopt latest technologies is paving a path of sustainable development. In order to capitalize its available human and natural resources, it is adopting advanced technologies and applications serving various verticals. Geospatial technologies are one of the key technologies which are making remarkable contribution towards this effort. It serves as an excellent decision-making tool at various levels of governance and application domains. Geoinformatics has been identified to be vital for improving the economic productivity of a country. Environmental and social benefits can also accrue from the use of geoinformation. Efforts are being made to provide an enabling environment for the uptake of GIT in Africa by promoting the development of technologies such as Spatial Data Infrastructure, Enterprise GIS, Web GIS, Mapping with Earth Observation Satellites. Some African countries have shown impressive results in the adoption and development of GI technologies, policy and its implementation. African countries continue to tackle numerous challenges like sustaining geospatial technology through the adoption of relevant standards, increasing the accessibility and use of spatial data in government's day-to-day business processes and service delivery, enhancing SDI and development of spatially enabled government services where geoinformation is used to assist states to perform online delivery of location based services. Other areas like infrastructure, utilities, land administration, disaster management, climate change, public safety etc. are dedicatedly adopting the usage of geospatial technologies to give the continent a new direction.

Map Africa 2010, which will be held on 23- 25 November 2010 at Cape Town aims to look into many aspects of this technology in building the continent and highlight the significant role that geospatial technologies hold in serving the various building blocks of a nation/continent. The conference intends to provide a unique forum for like-minded people to discuss on the latest offerings of geospatial technologies and how it contributes for social, economic and political development of Africa. It will act as a consolidated platform for industry, government and academia to expand geospatial horizons and add a new dimension to the African geospatial industry. This year, GIS Development, the organiser of Map Africa has joined hands with the Department of Rural Development and Land Affairs, South Africa, United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UN ECA), Ethiopia and Regional Centre for Mapping of Resources for Development (RCMRD), Kenya to co-organise this conference.