Utilisation of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) in Water Resources Management and in Sustainable Development Strategies.


Institutions involved in the project

• Institute for Earth Sciences
• University of Applied Sciences of Southern Switzerland
• Ticino – Switzerland
  
  
• Ecole des Mines, de l'Industrie et de la Géologie
• Niamey – Republic of Niger

General Framework
Data and information related to water supply systems generally cover a wide range of fields. These information and data concern technical aspects (water collecting, treatment, distribution, evacuation, …), social aspects (stakeholders’ habits and needs, resource partition between users, regions and countries, …), and economic aspects (impact of technical infrastructure’s costs on the price of water distributed, economic situation and financial resources distribution, …). Accepting the challenge of a good water resources management is a hard task and asks for powerful tools and knowledge.
In arid and semi-arid regions, this challenge is bigger due to harsh climatic conditions, scarcity of resources, and due to unfavourable economic conditions which often characterise these regions.
A very powerful tool for data collection, analysis and visualisation are Geographic Information Systems (GIS). They consist of a wide range of components, serving as a framework for hardware, data, software and people. GIS can assist people in charge of water supply to analyse complex situations and to supply decision makers with precious information.

Main Objective
The project consists of a short course on GIS utilisation. The main objective is to teach the participants how to use the functionality of ArcView 3.2 in a profitable manner, one of the most used softwares in GIS analysis, with an explicit application to water resources management.

Course Short Description
Participants are students and professors of the EMIG (the foreign partner), employees of the Environmental Ministry of Niger, and of UNICEF. The course lasts six days and consists of theoretical concepts and practical exercises. These exercises will focus on the water supply issue, including an example from Niger: the Dantiandou region and the upper unconfined aquifer belonging to the "Continental Terminal" regional aquifer. Some of the specific GIS tools which will be presented to participants are: GIS basics, an introduction to relational database principles, data import and export of tabular data in ArcView, data visualisation, projection principles and applications in GIS, vector and raster layers, spatial analysis and editing.
Furthermore, the Nigerian partner will organise a field trip with the aim to visit some water supply infrastructure.

Timing
The project is scheduled for March to April 2003