Non-Profit Tech Blog

I don’t always get a chance to commend nonprofits for their great use of technology but I ran into a paper article in ArcNews (it’s a newsletter about ArcGIS software — and no I don’t subscribe to it, it’s my wife’s!) that discussed a remarkable GIS project conducted by the IRC to plan for the location of school sites in Ethiopia.

Every day, millions of rural children in Ethiopia do not attend school. Instead, they work on farms; dig in mines; or perform strenuous household tasks, such as gathering firewood or fetching water, which together can take several hours each day. For them, education is out of reach, both because poor families require the additional income and because many areas lack elementary schooling altogether.

Beginning in 2005, the United States Department of Labor funded the International Rescue Committee (IRC) to build schools and train teachers for community Alternative Basic Education (ABE) schools, which would serve as institutions to transition children from the labor force into more formal educational institutions, such as primary schools. Simultaneous community awareness and education programs promoted the benefits of education and encouraged families to send their children to school…

…The Ethiopian Education Office lacks the infrastructure and funding to maintain information on primary school locations, village school age populations, and distances between schools and village populations. Low-level road maps are also not available for most rural districts. The IRC Ethiopia program therefore had to build its geographic database from the ground up. Behar Hussein, the IRC Ethiopia GIS coordinator, trained eight people in the use of Garmin eTrex Vista GPS units to aid in the survey of 491 villages. The surveyors used Garmin eTrex Vista GPS for the survey. While four of the eight surveyors gathered geographic data about village boundaries, roads, health centers, water points, and primary school locations, the remaining four gathered demographic data from each village: the number of households, number of children of each age, and number of children of each age attending formal schooling. The data took more than 50 days to collect and was cleaned and compiled at IRC’s Addis Ababa office.

Good job, IRC. You are rocking the techno-goodness. Next steps? Why not release this data using an open content license so that other nonprofits can use it.