This topic is very interesting. I am getting two big take-aways from it. First, in the US it's not an access issue but a monetary barrier to entry for small businesses. I go back and forth between the US and Zambia. GIS in Zambia is growing, but it's kind of the opposite type of barrier to entry. Zambia lacks data. If you need data pertaining to Zambia you have to go outside the country to get it, and even then it's incomplete. You have data for 3 consecutive years and nothing for the next 4 years. Also, the data aren't housed in Zambia. It's owned by and housed in the US or Europe, the IDF or World Bank. Also, solutions and GIS like Esri are extremely expensive. For a basic commercial license at $700 usd is almost an entire years salary in Zambia. So the issue I'm seeing in Zambia is how we provide FREE access to data that is housed in Zambia and where access to GIS apps, tools, and solutions is easily accessible. If the data aren't housed in Zambia, then Zambia doesn't own or control the data. AI can help facilitate this problem, but is not a solution. The US and Europe have devastated African countries, and then has monopoly on the data and the analytics, then americans want to come in with their NGOs and non-profits wanting to solve their problems for these countries without knowing or having an attachment to them. So, what I'm trying to solve is building warehouses in Zambia, where it's owned and controlled by Zambia for anyone to access and use for free without the need to depend on data housed in exploitative countries like the US and Europe.
At least for the software there's a lot of new options in the open source space such as QGIS and others for scalable analytics. I would check out DuckDB for spatial data analytics and using Python workflows as well. As it relates to the data, certainly routes of using open data are one place to go, but also developing data locally is important as it relates to data sovereignty.
This topic is very interesting. I am getting two big take-aways from it. First, in the US it's not an access issue but a monetary barrier to entry for small businesses. I go back and forth between the US and Zambia. GIS in Zambia is growing, but it's kind of the opposite type of barrier to entry. Zambia lacks data. If you need data pertaining to Zambia you have to go outside the country to get it, and even then it's incomplete. You have data for 3 consecutive years and nothing for the next 4 years. Also, the data aren't housed in Zambia. It's owned by and housed in the US or Europe, the IDF or World Bank. Also, solutions and GIS like Esri are extremely expensive. For a basic commercial license at $700 usd is almost an entire years salary in Zambia. So the issue I'm seeing in Zambia is how we provide FREE access to data that is housed in Zambia and where access to GIS apps, tools, and solutions is easily accessible. If the data aren't housed in Zambia, then Zambia doesn't own or control the data. AI can help facilitate this problem, but is not a solution. The US and Europe have devastated African countries, and then has monopoly on the data and the analytics, then americans want to come in with their NGOs and non-profits wanting to solve their problems for these countries without knowing or having an attachment to them. So, what I'm trying to solve is building warehouses in Zambia, where it's owned and controlled by Zambia for anyone to access and use for free without the need to depend on data housed in exploitative countries like the US and Europe.
At least for the software there's a lot of new options in the open source space such as QGIS and others for scalable analytics. I would check out DuckDB for spatial data analytics and using Python workflows as well. As it relates to the data, certainly routes of using open data are one place to go, but also developing data locally is important as it relates to data sovereignty.