By Nangamso Mabindla
9 October 2006

GEOGRAPHIC Information Systems, or GIS, should be used as a decision-making tool by municipalities, local government members were told at a GIS workshop held in East London in Buffalo City.

The two-day workshop, arranged recently by Buffalo City Municipality, the Swedish International Development Agency (Sida) and the Department of Local Government, was aimed at raising awareness in smaller municipalities of the importance of GIS in their decision making. Municipalities attending the workshop included the Nelson Mandela Metro, the Great Kei Municipality, Chris Hani District and Ngqushwa Municipality, among others.

Siyanda Makhanda, a representative of the Department of Local Government, said he was happy that the bigger municipalities, like Buffalo City, were willing to share ideas on successful GIS with smaller municipalities that were struggling to set up GIS.

"This is Project Consolidate in action," he said. "Here we see bigger municipalities working with the department to ensure that other municipalities use GIS [for] successful service delivery."

Over 60 percent of the country's municipalities still did not have a well functioning GIS department and software either because of a lack of funds or a lack of adequate people. "I hope that with this workshop we can convince officials to view GIS as a decision-making tool in areas like social services, the building of clinics and, ultimately, revenue management. GIS can be used as revenue management tool," Makhanda said.

Sida representative Christer Kjörnberg, who has worked all over the world setting up GIS in various countries, said the most important limitations and obstacles to the operational use of GIS were not of a technical nature but rather institutional, organisational, procedural and information quality issues.

"To address these obstacles, a GIS strategy dealing with institutional mandates and linkages, human skills development, technology strategies and financial management is required," he said.

For GIS to be successful a municipality needed to have hardware, software, data, people and methods. However, it could have all the components needed for a successful GIS, but still lack the right people needed to use the technology.

"A municipality might need to train people to operate the technology. But since we would like to use GIS for service delivery purposes, we need to include councillors in our training," said Kjörnberg, who helped set up the Buffalo City GIS.

Looking at the success of the City's system, GIS manager Phil Farrant said that one of the most important elements to ensure a GIS unit was successful, was setting achievable goals. "You need to define the GIS's functions; after doing that, you need to position it at a strategic level like the Mayor's Office. You need to make sure that you do not place it where it would have to compete for resources."

Buffalo's GIS system worked closely with its integrated development plan (IDP) in ensuring that people got the services they deserved. GIS has proven to be an effective tool for mapping and generating vital information for strategic planners. "Using GIS we were able to find out that we had 250 rural areas," Farrant said. "This was very important for the IDP because we used the data when analysing who was getting services and who wasn't. Using GIS data we also know where development should be focused and what is happening on the ground."

Using GIS the City was also able to see service delivery shortfalls, highlight service delivery gaps, analyse the quality of services and basic service delivery according to IDP objectives.

After identifying these areas departments would submit business plans for projects. The GIS unit would then extract details from the business plans. Budget expenditure would be extracted from the Venus (the City's financial management system), and progress indicators would then be captured by the project custodians.

"The GIS application is not too difficult [so a] manager can use it to query a project's status and to look at projects on or behind schedule, under or over expenditure. Managers also get full project details using GIS," Farrant said. "We can also use GIS to identify maintenance high-risk areas. Using integrated information, critical areas that affect service delivery become easily identifiable."

Farrant said that GIS also had healthcare management and burial management applications.