Center for GIS Applications - Harare, Zimbabwe

We are a Zimbabwean born tech-non-profit scientific research and development company leveraging the use of geospatial technology to support conservation and development initiatives in sub-Saharan Africa. Worldwide organizations are increasingly integrating geographic information systems and taking advantage of the power of geospatial intelligence to better understand how both communities and individuals use the land and their need for related services. We recognize that comprehensive use of geospatial technology in developing countries will await customization of training programmes and the development of national, municipal and community spatial databases that are openly shared and accessed in order to effectively and efficiently respond to conservation and development issues. We  

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therefore work to develop and appropriate a giscience capacity – an ability to create, capture, store and manipulate spatial information, understand changing patterns, processes and emphasize relationships among people, places, regions and their environment in space and time. Developing this scientific and technical capacity is increasingly important in the 21st century as the pace of change on the earth’s surface increases to unprecedented levels. Geospatial intelligence enables us to know location (where is it?), condition (what is at?), trends (what has changed since?), patterns (what spatial patterns exists) and modeling (what if?). This enables understanding and when we know we make better \-informed and therefore wiser decisions.

Our work spans from geospatial software and spatial data development, to leveraging its use in geodemographic research, development planning, responding to humanitarian crisis, tracking environmental change to helping planners develop sound land use policies. We develop spatial data such as household life style data, census data, commercial data (sales data and property records), cadastral data and satellite data about places from communities, cities and regions in creating profiles of those places for a wide range of applications emphasizing interdisciplinary problem solving.

Addressing this challenge is imperative in fostering the removal of barriers to the effective and ethical use of geospatial intelligence in practical work efforts such as urban planning, natural resources management, economic development, telecommunications and infrastructure maintenance, health, law enforcement, responding to natural disasters, driving local and central government efficiency, geo-enabling citizen voices and improving service delivery. We therefore work to integrate spatial data on these issues, manipulate those data and draw maps that arise from integration of data from several different sources, on different topics and at different scales in order to emphasize the spatial relationships among the objects being mapped, thus making scientific inquiry the hallmark of our work ethic.

We are proud to be a key catalyst of an innovation ecosystem that is merging in sub-Saharan Africa and around the world striving to create and leverage technology that solves local problems thus cumulatively offseting big global problems. .