Fixing national datasets: a deep clean of Mali’s pastoral infrastructure data
To better understand the needs of pastoralist herders, the Malian government, alongside NGOs built a large nationwide dataset of pastoral infrastructure (such as boreholes, veterinary clinics, livestock markets). The Malian Institute of Geography (IGM) unified this dataset from a variety of sources. Unfortunately, a lack of harmonisation between the collection and synthesising methods led to the data being unusable. Much of the geographic data contained false coordinates, toponymy errors, duplicate entries and no metadata.
To address these issues, HSS was brought on as a technical partner to use cutting-edge GIS technology to correct these errors. In addition to data cleaning methods, HSS used high resolution satellite imagery to help correct incorrect geographic data. A local partner, Tassaght oversaw the collection of field data to complete missing geographical data. Some of the key strengths of our work included:
- Low cost technology and prioritisation of open-source tools vastly reduced the cost of the project
- Using a trusted local partner with established community roots and satellite images facilitated data collection in a normally hard to reach area
Through our work with IGM and Tassaght, we were able to achieve the following results:
- Mali’s pastoral infrastructure has been cleaned and is now usable in any GIS software package.
- The data is being used to help orient herders towards important infrastructure through the GARBAL service, a call center for pastoralists.
- The pastoral water points are cleaned/updated and is usable now
- The use of a common, cleaned formatting allows for the data to be readily used by a multitude of actors