Speaker Bio & Abstract
eHealth Africa
Nigeria
BiographyUche leads communications at eHealth Africa and works with the team to evangelize for GIS across Africa. She has over fifteen years of experience working in Africa and the US as a strategic marketing and communications professional. Her expertise is helping tech-enabled companies and products tell stories that connect, extract data from customer stories that measure product validation, build demand generation strategies, showcase thought leadership and more. AbstractIn line with growing global recognition of the importance of data in achieving economic development, GIS has become a huge industry in Africa and access to data is often restricted and commoditized. By democratizing exploratory access to and re-use of existing geospatial data across Nigeria through an open access Data Portal, eHealth Africa aims to stimulate innovation and growth by removing the traditional barriers to access, use and shareability.
Over the past 10 years, eHealth Africa has built a comprehensive geodatabase to power our data portal, including administrative boundary and settlement data, population estimates and points of interest for sectors such as agriculture, education and health. By making this data available, we aim to facilitate easier discovery of opportunities for public and private institutions to build new services and improve operations. Through the portal, the user community, including government agencies and ministries, without specific GIS or Data Management expertise, can easily access and generate maps for planning and activity monitoring, and can access updated and accurate geodata. This will allow organizations to focus resources on programmatic data rather than base geospatial data and will open up more opportunities to develop evidence-based programs and public policy that will positively impact society.