Development Planning
General Problem
Since suffering from a 27 year civil war, the country is very behind from where it would be otherwise. After the war ended, the main focus was to try to rebuild the country the best way they could. The governmental entities concentrated first on rebuilding the provinces and help people get their homes back, then they focused on rebuilding the capital. Mapping the country was not a priority, and only relatively recently has mapping gained traction with the help of the global community.
The main issue, is that the country is not yet entirely mapped, especially the Malanje province. The Luquembo municipality, is very far from the main city of Malanje. Most of the roads, rivers, residential areas and agricultural lands, are not mapped and this causes a difficulty on governmental entities and Aid groups to get to them without a local person showing them the way to go. One risk that the Luquembo municipality faces from being too far from the city of Malanje, is that the inhabitants are too far from a major hospital. If they have an emergency, it will be hard for them to get into the city of Malanje on time especially since most of the inhabitants do not own a car. Getting the help there on time as well would be a difficulty since most of them do not know where to go. Also, not having this area mapped, it could difficult for the major Aid groups to get to the area if there is some kind of environmental disaster or maybe another civil war.
USAID/Angola also received funding for a Global Climate Change Initiative (GGCI) Integration Pilot Project. They worked on seeing the effects on climate change.
Reference: http://pdf.usaid.gov/pdf_docs/pa00kr9q.pdf
Nayara Vasconcelos
Possible Solutions
Most of the problems in Angola have been identified and the humanitarian work has been ongoing, but the geographic resources to improve efforts are lacking to aid development. Creating the open data for Angolans to use to locate people, places, and resources will help them to better identify, plan, and act on problems and possibilities. The country is so large with many remote areas, that our work on OpenStreetMap is literally putting areas on the map for everyone to see and be aware of. In the future the data can be utilized to plan routes for travel and to identify underdeveloped and under-connected areas, which will most importantly lead to greater connectivity for the country.
Alex Bogedain
Current Development Status
Angola and the International Community are working to ensure sustainable development as they rebuild the country. The main problem right now is access to information, geographic information in particular. Angolan geospatial data is largely nonexistent and poorly gathered which hampers future humanitarian and development efforts. Difficulties arise for Angolans and International Aid workers that travel from one part of Angola to another by a vehicle, due to the lack of maps, have to resort to information gathering by extensively consulting locals. If developed to its fullest extent, Angola has the potential to be a powerhouse for regional trade and investment, as the country is second to Nigeria in African oil exports already. Angola has tremendous agricultural resources and tremendous agricultural potential, better maps will have a profound impact on visualizing and communicating both agricultural spatial extent and transportation connectivity leading to a simplification of the process of recognizing places for needed improvements. Development efforts as of late have attempted to keep an eye on and develop with respect to global and local climate change, as much of the country is susceptible to both devastating droughts and floods. The amount of damage and missed developmental opportunities during the civil war set back the country drastically, but with the focus on reconstruction by both the Angolan government and International agencies, Angola is poised to attain its proper place in the world.
China Onyia and Alex Bogedain
Mapping Status & Goals
This region of Angola has almost nothing mapped, so we are mapping majority of the features in the area. Residential areas, roads, water sources, and agricultural land are the main features to map. The four categories of roads that we come across are tertiary roads, residential roads, minor/unclassified roads, and unmaintained track roads. The only tertiary road in the area is the one that comes down from Malanje into Luquembo. We have debated on whether to call it a secondary road, but until we have influence from locals, we decided to keep it what it was when we started and construct our typology from there. The main tertiary road that comes into the area is a very wide and heavily used dirt road, so it was obvious that it was more important than the roads that link villages in the area. The roads that link villages in the area generally have two widths, the first is about wide enough for two trucks to pass each other easily, and the second is for the most part wide enough for one. As such, we stretched the use of the residential road type to be for any dirt road that connects several villages (residential areas) and reserved the minor/unclassified road type for roads that spur from one village to another (generally at most 2 villages) that are obviously smaller than the roads connecting several villages. Unmaintained track roads are small paths and tracks that disperse out of residential areas and lead to water sources, farm lands, or just out in to the bush that are most likely for foot traffic or motorbikes, appearing barely wide enough for a truck to drive on. The only water sources that we are mapping are rivers, and for the most part we are just re-mapping crudely drawn lines that barely represent the paths of the rivers.
There is an abundance of agriculture in this region of Angola, so the farm land was another feature we wanted to map, but it will be a secondary focus along with the majority of unmaintained track roads after mapping the main roads and residential areas. Mapping these features is important to the communities of Angola and will help with their resilience because it shows the development of the region. With barely any of the area mapped, no one except the people living there know what or where anything is. The development of the region could help with potential threats to the community in the future. For example, if disease were to break out, roads would be an important feature that would help get relief to affected areas, specifically, it would be important to know the location of the residential areas and visualize their connectivity to the rest of the province and country. The location of water sources and agricultural land is also important, water and food are both crucial for survival and would help in any disaster. Being able to map the areas will help to better calculate potential agricultural yields in order to plan for drought and famine resilience. In summary, knowing the location of roads, residential areas, water sources, and agricultural lands are important to help any community be more resilient.
Lauren Goff and Alex Bogedain