From 25-27 October, a training for advanced users was successfully organized and lead by CSI Hand in Hand team and RLC, with the support of ESA, with the objective of allowing advanced users to conduct their own geospatial analysis using the RLC HiH instance, and other users to  access their datasets. More than 30 experts of the whole Latin American region (including IT/Geospatial focal points, Tabular data focal points, data analysts, data contributors with advanced knowledge of Geoespatial Information Systems etc), from over 12 countries, attended the 3 hours sessions scheduled for these 3 intensive days, contributing through their active participation to the capacity development strategy for 2021 developed by RLC in their GIS Task Force Midterm memorandum. The goal of the latter is to empower non-experts in using existing GIS Tools to increase project impact, and to provide advanced users with the tools they need to improve their work and make their work accessible to non-expert users. The training fitted then the overall goal of FAO to provide FAO project formulators with an approach and tools to help them make informed decisions about the locations of interventions, contributing  to accelerate the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), SDG1 and SDG 2, using the most sophisticated tools available to identify opportunities where the Organization can make a greater impact.

Karl Morteo, Manager of the HIH geospatial platform (CSI), Michael Austin Rahija, Regional Statistician (RLC), and Marygrace Balinos Castor, RLC Geospatial Information System (GIS) expert  (RLC) tell us more about the workshop and all the initiatives laying behind.

How did the idea of this training came to life?

Michael Austin Rahija (MAR): One of the key priorities of the RLC Task Force during 2021 has been to develop and implement capacity development activities to help country offices leverage the HiH platform and geospatial tools to increase project impact. For those that don´t know, the RLC GIS Task Force meets monthly and is composed of  technical, strategic, and managerial colleagues who provide strategic guidance on the technical implementation of geospatial tools in the Latin American Region (LAC). As a first step,  during June 2021, RLC carried out a GIS capacity and needs assessment survey with responses from 29 of the 33 countries in the region. A key finding was that some country offices have advanced GIS users, but they were not using the  HiH platform. The main reason is the lack of country relevant subnational datasets. Accordingly, it was decided to design a training for these advanced users aiming to train them to incorporate their geospatial datasets into the HiH platform so that they could use the platform for analysis, and that other colleagues could also use their datasets. RLC was already receiving support on this issue from CSI, so after discussing with CSI, and ESA, it was decided to colloborate on a regional advanced training.

What are the major difficulties you are facing in adopting GIS tools in the region?

MAR: By far, the biggest challenge is a lack of capacity in country offices. Due to resources constraints, and competing priorities, very few country offices can hire staff which are proficient in GIS tools and methods. In fact, the aforementioned survey revealed that about a third countries have no capacity, another third have some basic capacity, and the last third have some consultants with advanced GIS capacity. Also, only 41% of the responding countries had used one of the existing tools (ArcGIS Online, or HiH Geospatial Platform). For the other 59%, the primary reason was that, despite knowing that these platforms existed, they did not know how to use them!To date, also, there has not been any systematic efforts to use maps, and GIS stories to demonstrate the analytical and communicative power of GIS. So, there is a strong need to build communications activities around Geospatial Technology applications as well as properly traintheir users. In this regard, we developed two trainings. The first is aimed at basic users focusing on using HiH to develop maps for communication purposes, and some basic multicriteria analysis for prioritizing terroritories of intervention, and the second ones, more advanced, are targeted to advanced users focusing on adding new layers and datasets to HiH RLC platform. This was then seen as a solution to address these needs.

So how was the collaboration with HQ organized?

Karl Morteo (KM): When we received the request of our colleagues in RLC, we moved as quickly as possible to provide them with the best response, tailored to their needs. An important aspect of our work in CSI is the provision of digital capabilities for impact, to quickly enable response to expressed needs, moving towards SDGs achievement. We are looking to provide completely new digital capabilities almost immediately — including Data, Geospatial platform and subset of tools, with analytics and dashboards to give instantly available insights.

Following on that, one of the key pillars of the HiH initiative is indeed to build local capacity to integrate subnational and national data as well as use the geospatial platform to inform project development, decision-making and forecasting combining tabular and geospatial data from diverse sources. During the whole year, our Geospatial Platform team has been leading around 25 training and capacity building workshops with several countries/units across the globe and RLC definitely had to be part of this renewed regional focus. So, it was part of our mandate to assist our colleagues to reach their objectives of autonomy regarding data sharing, uploading and management, for the greatest benefit of their region.

What were the training´s highlights?

KM: With the great teamwork and collaboration of our experts, led by Carlo Cancellieri, we started with a series of trainings for the trainers, for their GIS experts and focused on RLC specific needs, including sessions on datasets upload, CKAN and tabular data, mosaics and big data.. This helped us to put the agenda for the broad training that we then organized together for the whole LAC region.

The first day was focused on Publishing and sharing on HIH geo spatial platform, providing an overview of the publishing procedure and metadata documentation, so that afterwards, the workshop users would be able to understand the basic architecture of the HiH geospatial platform and requirements for publishing and sharing data, be able to upload geospatial datasets using GeoCAT bridge and to document metadata using GeoNetwork catalogue and be capable to load tabular data and to create metadata documentation using CKAN. Our RLC colleagues also presented specifically the RLC instance, with its particular purpose and use. The second day we provided detailed guidance on more advanced back-end features to add tabular data to the HiH platform as well as create metadata records in the CKAN. Finally, the third and last day, we focused on advanced styling with more advanced insights on CKAN for templates languages and Terriajs View Formats.

We also included practical exercises so that the participants could try themselves the uploading and management of a dataset under the guidance of our team so that they could get more hand on experience. Of course, we are fully conscient about the complexity of all the information shared and that is a bit of a starting point to many of us so the CSI Hand in Hand geospatial team is remaining fully available for all the questions that might arise to continue this work together in the future.

Are there any additional points to stress out or actions foreseen for the future?

Marygrace Balinos Castor (MBC): Yes, as mentioned by Michael before, now with this strengthened knowledge, we intend to carry on our activities regarding the production of a Guide and Basic training for the use of HiH-RLC platform in project planning and communications. The objective of the basic training is not to make the attendants experts in the highly technical aspects of geo-spatial analysis, but simply use already developed tools to inform their decision-making and increase impact. The guide will be developed with two pilot countries while the Basic Training will be focused on the principles of this guide that will include an overview of Hand-in-Hand RLC (HiH-RLC) Geospatial Platform, basic principles of producing maps for communication purposes including strategic documents and steps for using HiH-RLC to produce maps and making decisions to identify locations of interventions based on the PPAs.  In addition, we aim at improving our HiH-RLC Instance that currently lacks many LAC-relevant datasets and has limited printing functions.

During the second half of 2021, let me add that we have also been working towards the establishment of the Geographic Knowledge, Innovation, and Technology Network (GeoKIT Network) of LAC with the objective of sharing knowledge, good practices, and lessons learned, and promoting use of Geospatial technology in the region. This will be achieved through Bi-monthly meetings for planning and knowledge sharing, 30-min GeoKIT Talks webinar series open to all FAO employees and focused on business cases of geospatial tools to improve project impact as well as the production and dissemination of GeoKnowIT maps, stories, and infographics highlighting interesting use cases, or knowledge generated by geospatial analysis.

So, we hope to continue this fruitful collaboration with our CSI colleagues as communication and knowledge sharing are key to achieve our common objectives.

For more information about the HIH Geospatial Platform, contact FAO-Data@fao.org

For more information on RLC GeoKIT Network initiatives and the RLC HiH instance, contact marygrace.balinoscastor@fao.org

You can visit the RLC HIH Instance here