An email I received from a former student that shows how difficult it can be to do GIS analyses in other countries. It is not just the lack of data that makes things difficult!

I am still in Dakar, working (in French!) to set up a municipal GIS at the City of Dakar's Urban Planning office in that six-month CIDA-funded internship with Vancouver-based NGO Sustainable Cities International I emailed you about last summer (asking for a reference). I've been here since early August and am flying home end of February, I can't believe how fast time has passed in this crazy, bustling, noisy, fabulous West African city. The work hasn't so much been technical and GIS-heavy, although I am always working to get more up-to-date data (what we have is ten years old) and creating partnerships with other public and private national and local organizations with GIS capabilities, as well as training the office's computer tech in basic GIS manipulations.

The work culture here, at least at the City level, is not one of collaboration or free exchange of data/info/anything, so I spent much of my time trying to convince City employees and Directors of the importance and utility of a GIS, but also the necessity of sharing data, collaboration, etc. What they really need is to a) hire a GIS tech, and b) find more professional training opportunities for the office's computer tech I'm currently training.

As a pilot project to help launch the GIS, the City's doing its first ever (!) survey of the publicity billboards implanted on its territory, checking if they have legal authorizations from the City and the size, locations, etc. As part of this I'm accompanying the City team with a handheld GPS and taking the coordinates of the billboards, then loading the points into ArcMap and joining it to the table with all the authorization info, so they can eventually manage all the billboards as well as requests for new authorizations using ArcGIS. We are miles away from this point now though -- the City doesn't have a network or a local server (or even anti-virus software or internet, at least in my office!), nor the money to invest in the software/hardware/personnel/training required to set up the municipal GIS. For example, we still don't have a compete layer of the City's roads with names (this is partly due to the fact that many of the streets in Dakar don't have names). Anyways, this is just a sliver of my experience, but suffice to say that I am really, actually!, using what we learned in all those long 270/370/479 labs, and I will never ever again take for granted the data and infrastructure we have to work with in North America! Also, I never would have gotten this position if you hadn't forwarded it to the 479 mailing list last year, so thanks again!