Five ways geospatial can grow your economy

Any government that invests in geospatial, will benefit from improved precision, greater accuracy, and faster decisions that lead to cost savings, increased competitiveness and productivity through the use of accurate geospatial information.

Five things you can do now to grow your economy with geospatial:

1. Build or upgrade your base map

Secure property rights for citizens are critical to building a strong economy and geospatial is central to establishing them. Insecure land rights are a major contributing factor to poverty, gender inequality, social instability and conflict, and rural-urban migration.

2. Generate government revenue

With geospatial information, it's possible to increase tax revenues by maintaining land valuation and ownership data. Without an accurate, up-to-date record of all the residential and business addresses in the country, it becomes almost impossible to collect national and local taxes.

3. Drive innovation and new technologies

Geospatial-enabled technologies like drones and artificial intelligence can help nations leap forward in their development. This requires governments to invest not only in geospatial information to serve the public sector, but also to ensure their data is accessible and exploitable by partners and private companies. In so doing, they can deliver returns on their investments in geospatial information whilst laying the building blocks for a digital economy.

4. Invest in sustainable development

Sustainable management of the environment, particularly water sources and lakes, forestry, coastal zones, national parks and crop yield prediction, relies upon geospatial information. Many geospatial information applications are essential for the successful delivery of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). All UN member states have committed to these goals which aim to alleviate poverty and provide benefits to citizens. Geospatial information can help countries to reach their targets by improving the planning, decision-making and measurement of a range of programs and services.

5. Take a geospatial readiness assessment

High-quality geospatial data powers effective decision-making and effective policymaking.

It supports sustainable growth and can deliver real benefits to nations. Accurately locating assets and resources, and knowing how they’re being used across different services is essential. But where do you start?

You must objectively assess a country’s geospatial capabilities. How ready it is, and how ready it needs to be. We’ve built a tool to help do just that. Assess your geospatial data governance readiness right now, for free. It covers:

• Collecting and managing data.
• Data quality and data governance.
• Product and service development.
• Corporate governance.
• Stakeholder engagement.
• Supply chain and operations management.
• Using geospatial technologies.