The Communication Initiative
Development action with informed and engaged societies
The Communication Initiative
After nearly 28 years, The Communication Initiative (The CI) Global is entering a new chapter. Following a period of transition, the global website has been transferred to the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) in South Africa, where it will be administered by the Social and Behaviour Change Communication Division. Wits' commitment to social change and justice makes it a trusted steward for The CI's legacy and future.
 
Co-founder Victoria Martin is pleased to see this work continue under Wits' leadership. Victoria knows that co-founder Warren Feek (1953–2024) would have felt deep pride in The CI Global's Africa-led direction.
 
We honour the team and partners who sustained The CI for decades. Meanwhile, La Iniciativa de Comunicación (CILA) continues independently at cila.comminitcila.com and is linked with The CI Global site.
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GeoNetwork's InterMap Viewer

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GeoNetwork's InterMap viewer is an Internet-based global mapping system developed jointly by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and the World Food Programme (WFP) to fight hunger in developing countries. InterMap viewer provides agricultural information to decision-makers, allowing them to access satellite imagery, interactive maps, and spatial databases from GeoNetwork, a group of various development institutions from around the world. Organisers aim to help developing countries - including Mozambique, Senegal, South Africa, and Uganda - improve their ability to manage spatial information and to harmonise and improve their access to FAO's spatial databases of agriculture, forestry, fisheries and food security.
Communication Strategies

This tool uses satellite imagery and spatial databases to facilitate fighting hunger and rural poverty. GeoNetwork's InterMap viewer enables users to overlay maps from multiple servers housed at development institutions worldwide to create a customised thematic composite map on their own computer covering such variables as soil quality, vegetation and population density, and marketing access. The project organisers say the tool is used to identify problems and to suggest possible solutions.

"By overlaying various map layers, InterMap can illustrate the spatial relationship between a series of variables. It can suggest, for example, the extent to which a poor transport infrastructure is keeping a region with a rich agricultural endowment in poverty. Its use of free, open-source software minimises costs to users - a particular plus for those in developing countries, who can use, modify and redistribute the system source code and do not need to rely on foreign suppliers or costly proprietary software."

"These maps, which may plot soil quality, vegetation, population density, or marketing access, can then be superimposed onto each other, allowing researchers to analyze the ‘variables of hunger.' The free, open-source software also provides non-profits, international agencies, and research institutions with a way to standardize, store, and share their data."

GeoNetwork's Intermap software is available to governments of developing countries with the hope that they will be able to isolate the causes of food shortages in their nations. "The tool promotes multidisciplinary approaches to sustainable development by allowing FAO, other UN agencies, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and research institutions worldwide to share and distribute geographically-referenced data more easily".

The system was tested and evaluated by 12 international and governmental agencies during field trials in Mozambique. These agencies, who work on "agriculture, food security and humanitarian issues have been using it since September 2003 to share information and avoid duplication. The system has also been implemented in its regional bureaux in Senegal, South Africa and Uganda."

Development Issues

Agriculture, Economic Development, Food Security, Information Access and Sharing Technology.

Partners

WFP, FAO

Sources

Digital Divide website on August 13 2004.