RCMRD (Regional Center for Mapping of Resources for Development) staff from Nairobi, Kenya, Catherine Kunyiha (Remote Sensing Expert) and Julie Maingi (GIS Expert), came to Ethiopia for the week of September 28th to collaborate on the gROADS tool and training with iMMAP staff Anna Schemper.
After a day in Addis planning and preparing for the training, Catherine and Julie traveled to Dessie, Ethiopia where they spent two days training WFP field staff on the gROADS data collection tool. Approximately 15 participants attended with additional training provided for the Dessie WFP suboffice ICT focal points.
In total, throughout Ethiopia approximately 100 personnel, mainly from WFP but also from other organizations, have been trained in the use of the CyberTracker roads data collection tool. In addition, requests for additional training are starting to come in as the newly generated roads data reaches other agency personnel, prompting some enthusiastic cries to participate and contribute!
Data collection from incidental data collectors in Somali Region suboffices (Dire Dawa, Jijiga, Gode, and Kebridehar suboffices) has increased considerably over the last few weeks. With the current influx of data, it is estimated that Somali Region data collection should be complete within 1-2 weeks, enabling units to be shifted to priority areas in different regions. Collection has just started out of Dessie Suboffice in northern Ethiopia (following the training conducted by RCMRD staff), from where WFP FMAs monitor all of Amhara and Afar Regions to the FDP level.
Data collection efforts will be expanded there pending the availability of additional PDA/GPS units and the finalization of contracting with assertive national consultants/surveyors, with whom WFP Ethiopia is currently in conversation.
In the meantime back at CIESIN, GIS staff have completed the development of an AcrGIS Pyhon script which automatically generates clean attributed roads shapefiles from the raw CTX files captured in the GPS units. 2 members of staff there are now processing data captured so far.
This newly collected data will be merged with pre-existing data that was deemed of sufficient quality as well as with data digitized from satellite imagery through a parallel road mapping project. We plan to have the lot integrated into the most accurate and complete Ethiopia roads dataset available to date by early December. We will include an updated road map of Ethiopia showing progress made so far on our next post, so watch this space..
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