humanitarian.info

Last weekend in Barisal, I managed to get some vaguely interesting data that might help water and sanitation provision in the cyclone-affected areas of Bangladesh, and decided that it would work best on a map. Problem: no maps.

Sometimes you simply don’t have the resources to implement GIS in the field. The UNICEF office here is quite large, but there’s nobody who uses GIS the only people with GIS skills are too busy to work on this. I don’t have the time to set anything up (and I’m barely competent to do so); and even if I did set something up, there’s nobody to take it over when I leave (imminently).

I’d prefer to have some proper GIS going, but I’m not a purist when it comes to mapping. In the end, a map is just a tool, and if it does the job, it doesn’t matter what technology you use to make it. So I took the gif file maps which I found on the Government of Bangladesh website, inserted them into a word document, and then added a bunch of text boxes. The result? Scrappy maps!

Now these maps need some a lot of explanation, so every time we distribute them in meetings, we include an explanation note. However their main purpose is simply to provoke discussion and to encourage people to commit resources, so it’s important that they’re not seen as definitive. So what do they show, and why did we make them?

This is a map of Barguna District in Barisal Division. In the left-hand column there’s a list of unions (the lowest administrative level in Bangladesh) where it’s not possible to sink tube wells. We collated this list from the Department of Public Health Engineering, from telephone calls, and DANIDA, from some photocopied reports that I lifted from their office.

The data itself only tells us whether it’s possible to sink tube wells in a particular location – but we assume that if that isn’t possible, then the local people rely on ponds for their water needs. Given that most ponds were contaminated by the cyclone, that means that they’re likely to be suffering from water scarcity, which means that they should be a priority for relief.

The right-hand column shows the water supply activities that we know about (from our co-ordination meetings) and the locations where water trucking has been proposed (by our field teams). This list is very provisional, but it tells us roughly how much activity is going on in each location. If you match the demand (left-hand column) with the supply (right-hand column), you can start to see where there might be gaps in service.

So these maps can be used in meetings for two purposes. First, they give people an overview of the situation in a particular district, on which they can give their feedback. These maps could be wrong or misleading, and we want to hear if anybody has any corrections, comments or updates. Second, they give us a tool for co-ordination, helping us to make better decisions about how to respond to a particular issue – in this case, water scarcity.