Designing a GIS to meet real needs in the maldives

Abstract

The Government of the Republic of Maldives has received financing from the International Development Association (IDA) toward the cost of the Maldives Environmental Management Project, part of which was to develop a National Geographic Information System (NGIS) Strategic Framework and Implementation Plan. The development objective of the project is to strengthen the capacity for environmental management in the Maldives, by addressing some of the human resource constraints and informational impediments to improved environmental management. This paper presents the approaches used to overcome the many hurdles that were faced to develop the Strategic Framework and Implementation Plan. While the many challenges of designing an enterprise GIS to meet the real needs of small-island nations have been reviewed in previous papers, this project faced additional issues. To the challenges of dealing with national as well as local issues and operating with limited budgets, the situation in the Maldives was further complicated by a general lack of expertise in GIS, limited education in the field, virtually no existing system capability in the field, and a user community that generally lacked practical experience. This paper describes how all of these countervailing forces were seamlessly managed by the team so that the solution was made by and for the citizens of the Maldives. The description of the approaches used to develop the solution forms a useful guide to the development of a Spatial Data Infrastructure in the development context.