The participatory methods and techniques used in this project, increased awareness among key decision makers in different sectors of the advantages in using urban indicators and GI technologies to make policy decisions and day-to-day management decisions. A direct outcome of our project has been the establishment of a regional GIS steering committee that will facilitate the adoption of these methods and work collectively to strengthen the Dakar region’s data and GIS infrastructure.

The research team investigated the potential benefits and limitations of using ArcIMS to facilitate urban indicators analysis in developing countries. Building on ArcIMS’ strengths that lie on the server side, we recommend the following two uses of the software rather than generalized GIS training. These views are in concordance with the vendor’s perspective.

  • Development of active server pages-based functions that support urban indicator analysis. This will allow local decision makers to analyze datasets with regular web browsers without any need for sophisticated hard- and software.
  • Establishment of a regional spatial data infrastructure with variable access privileges to a multitude of datasets, which fosters collaboration among sometimes competing agencies.