FOSS4G 2022 general tracks

In many countries, access to schooling is one of the key measures of performance of the education system. It is not always known how long learners walk to school, even if the buffer distance is set by policy. GISPO teamed up with the UNESCO International Institute of Educational Planning (IIEP) to study the problem.

The result is a new QGIS plugin (“Catchment”) which allows easily calculating catchment areas based on travel time (isochrones), for all schools across a whole territory. The plugin uses the open source Graphhopper routing server and OpenStreetMap data across the globe. This allows us to easily find out how many people live e.g. 15, 30 or 60 minutes away from education in different parts of a country.

Further, the development of the plugin triggered a campaign of local OpenStreetMap mapping in Madagascar, which was one of the first countries to pilot the plugin. Having more roads mapped on OpenStreetMap has an impact far beyond educational planning.

Naturally, the same plugin may also be used for calculating all kinds of service catchment areas in QGIS; it was also employed to e.g. calculate access to rail transit across Helsinki metropolitan region.

The presentation will share how UNESCO’s International Institute for Educational Planning (IIEP) applies FOSS4G technologies to advance Ministries of Education’s use of geospatial data in planning better educational results among school children. Our work here at the IIEP-UNESCO is to design tools for educational planners all around the world, and FOSS4G has been the cornerstone of our work.

Educational planners are the professionals who work in Ministries of Education –in district offices or in the central office-- that are tasked with designing the best possible strategies and interventions to make sure that all learners will get good quality access to relevant and efficient educational services. For decades, planners have been using geospatial insights with minimal computing capacity and- to be honest- very little spatial data.

Over the last few years, we have been completely refurbishing the methods and the data that we use as planners, and working with the FOSS4G community has been instrumental in fulfilling our mission.
This talk is about sharing concrete applications and use cases of geospatial data in educational planning. For example, we spatialize the number of students that will enrol in each grade in different communities, we plan for the training, recruitment, deployment, and retention of the teaching staff, we lead suitability analyses to check where to best build a new school or where to refurbish existing ones.

So in this presentation we will show you examples of application of tools and methodologies all built on FOSS:
- Spatialized school-age populations in Jamaica
- Routing optimization of inspection circuits in Finland
- Geographically-weighted regressions for improving learning in Colombia
- School infrastructure and natural hazard risk model in Indonesia
- Sea level rise and historical floods in Viet Nam
- School catchment areas based on travel time (check out the presentation submitted by Riku Oja from GISPO, it’s our joint work!)

As an institution here at IIEP we have sought to advance this line of work by (1) making a complete switch to free and open source software (FOSS) and open access documentation and data sources (OpenScience), (2) bringing geospatial approaches and big, small, and thick data, to update EDplanning processes, (3) creating technical partnerships with instances such as GISPO, UNOSAT, among others, and (4) collaborating on informing education policy-making with geospatial insights.

This talk is an invitation to all geospatial data geeks to join us in shaping the future of educational planning.