The East African Community Cartographic Service Upgrade Proposal and Roadmap

The East African Community is a regional block bringing together Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi and South Sudan into various forms of economic partnership, the eventual dream being to achieve political federation. The need for a harmonised stateof-the-art cartographic service to support a coordinated approach for the discovery, application and administration of geo-information (GI) services in cross-border tasks such as disaster risk, security and environmental monitoring cannot be gainsaid. The overall objective was to determine the status of cartographic services in the East African Community (EAC) member states and to subsequently propose a roadmap for a harmonised, state-of-the-art cartographic service. The status determination was accomplished through survey of five of the six EAC member states. This paper is a summary of the work done to achieve the second through to the fourth objective, the first objective’s work having been published in the Journal of Geographic Information System (JGIS) publication of January 2019.

A methodology was adopted whereby the gaps were critically examined and since every gap required an action or more to address, the possible interventions were gathered from relevant literature, knowledge and best practices to define a suitable intervention. The interventions ranged from awareness workshops, capacity building activities to equipment purchase etc. Every intervention required resources in terms of personnel, capital and the time which were also costed. The EAC cartographic services harmonization was approximately $44,309,437 achievable in 36 months. A comparison of these services with the EuroGeographics revealed gaps which required further upgrade and harmonisation. The state-of-the-art roadmap was designed at approximately $22,402,300 achievable in 60 months. Therefore, $66,712,237 was the cost of elevating the EAC cartographic services from their current state to the state-ofthe-art in 96 months. The state-of-the-art implementation framework was designed and is the basis for further actions. The supporting operational and systems architectures were also unveiled to support the proposed implementation.