2022-08-24, 17:30–17:35 (Europe/Rome), Room 9
MAps for Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation (MAPME) is an initiative founded by Geo-geeks and FOSS enthusiasts from KfW Development Bank (KfW), French Development Agency (AFD) and MapTailor Geospatial Consultants.
Aid agencies such as KfW and AFD financially assist developing countries in fighting hunger, poverty, disease, illiteracy and environmental degradation around the world. Together with our partner countries we are key decision makers in the allocation of the so-called Official Development Assistance (ODA). KfW, for example, allocated 12.4 bn. EUR to assist developing countries achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2020.
Geodata and geospatial technologies help us to take informed decisions to allocate funds responsibly and maximize public goods and benefits. Nevertheless, the uptake of open data and geospatial technologies within our institutions and decision-making processes is still relatively low. We think that one of the main reasons for this is missing openness in the way that we deal with data-analytic questions in our institutions.
In response we founded MAPME, an open community and open-source initiative to upscale and democratize the usage of geodata and geo-spatial technologies within our own institutions as well as our partners. With this initiative we promote cultural change in our institutions by prototyping small FOSS and open-data pilot projects that illustrate the power and usefulness of these technologies to improve development aid projects. One of our outputs is the mapme.biodiversity package, which offers R-users the possibility to automatically download and process several important open-data sources for conservation science using a parallelization approach to deal with large AOIs or global conservation portfolios (https://github.com/mapme-initiative/mapme.biodiversity).
We will offer a talk where we share our approach to FOSS application and development, what we see as barriers in our institutional and IT contexts and first successes stories that leveraged the power of geospatial data for learning about our projects and taking more informed decisions.
Master in Geography and Economics from University of Bonn. Worked in the conservation sector with GIZ in Brazil. Phd on conservation effectivness at the Center for Development Research/University of Bonn. Since 2018 project evaluator at the KfW development bank and co-founder of the MAPME-Initiative.