THE FIRST GEO CONFERENCE IN AFGHANISTAN

Geo Conference Background

The first Geo Conference in Afghanistan was jointly organized by Afghanistan Information Management Services (AIMS), Liwal Limited (ESRI and LEICA Geosystems Distributor), Afghanistan Engineering District (AED) and International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) on Tuesday April 24th 2007.  Tens of GIS users participated in this occasion from different government, national and international organizations.

This approach was a major step towards promoting GIS, data standards, data sharing and data dissemination in the country.

Geo Conference Goals

The Geo Conference goals were to:

• Share how GIS is used within government of Afghanistan and International Development Communities and Agencies.
• Know the GIS users and the GIS community.
• Enhance each participant’s awareness of GIS projects in the country.
• Create methods of sharing information of similar projects.
• Create template for MoU between those organizations who are willing to share data.
• Reduce the percentage of duplicate projects by awareness of similar projects between organizations.
• Create more understanding between organizations to share data and work together if projects are the same.
• Create an executive committee to take serious actions on creating Afghanistan Spatial Data Infrastructure.
• Educate the decision makers in specific Ministries to take a stronger role in supporting the Afghanistan Spatial Data Infrastructure. 

Geo Conference Participants:

The Geo Conference participants were the government senior level, ISAF, United Nations, International Development Communities, NGOs, private sectors, national and International group’s officials from various other embassies and representatives from donors’ community.

Geo Conference Sessions:

The conference started by recitation of some verses of Holy Quran. After recitation of the Holy Quran, the conference goals, agenda and sessions were briefed. The geo conference had two sessions; the morning session and the afternoon session. The morning session included presentations regarding the use of GIS in different government, national and international organizations. And, the afternoon session focused more on two technical topics; National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI) and Multi Donor Database - ACSP.
Following the conference agenda, a welcome note was stated by the project manager of AIMS. Subsequently, a number of speeches were stated by the high level government bodies. After the speeches were stated, the presentation session started. Different organizations presented their presentations regarding the use of GIS in their organizations. Subsequent to the morning session, the next session that covered NSDI and Multi Donor Database started. Later on, this session followed by an open discussion where different issues and concerns related to administrative boundaries, coordination of national and international organizations, data standards, data duplication and so on were discussed. The conference ended by wrap up of the open discussion.

During the conference, for better language comprehension, simultaneous translation was available in Dari, Pushto and English.

Geo Conference Result:

The result of the geo conference was that different GIS users were recognized, various GIS projects in the country were known as well as some of the goals were accomplished.

Annex 1.
Conference Schedule.

Annex 2.
List of Conference Participants.

Annex 3.
Conference Pictures.

Next Geo Conference:
The next Geo Conference will be held in Kabul – Afghanistan in year 2008.