Shared location data means faster, smarter infrastructure decisions. (Image: AfriGIS)
Halfway through this financial year, South Africa’s municipalities had spent just over a third of their capital budgets. Around R50 billion set aside for infrastructure such as roads, water and electricity had yet to be spent. The shortfall has many causes, but one of them seldom gets named: the data these decisions rest on couldn’t reliably agree on what sits where and how.
Every leap in industrial productivity began with an agreement that looked trivial at the time. A common screw thread, so a bolt cut in one workshop fitted a nut made in another. A single railway gauge, so a loaded wagon crossed the country instead of being emptied at every change of track. Decades later, a standard steel box did the same for global shipping. Solving the ‘translation’ challenge at each boundary where one system met the next was where growth was unleashed. In May, with almost no fanfare, South Africa agreed on the equivalent for the data behind its biggest decisions.
A standard for the ground beneath us
The Minister of Land Reform and Rural Development has gazetted a suite of national standards for spatial information under the Spatial Data Infrastructure Act. They took effect at the end of June, and the country now has a single way to capture, maintain and share spatial data. More than 20 years after the Act that first called for them, and after the painstaking work of many, many dedicated professionals on top of high-stakes collaborations which AfriGIS proudly formed a part of, the standards now carry a signature.
Make no mistake, more than two decades of hard work wasn’t done to create a simple data or file format: even a shared format isn't the same as shared meaning. Systems have to agree on what to call a feature, hold its identity steady as things like streets are renamed and erven subdivided, and record how old and how accurate each dataset is. Even two very tidy datasets might be three months versus three years old, or surveyed to one metre versus 50. Now, name changes, accuracy and all aspects of data quality can inform decisions better.
Decisions made in the dark
National Treasury regularly highlights the “credibility” of submitted municipal data as a priority while capital budgets still often go underspent. But municipalities can only submit data that is informed by other data sources insofar as the two can actually speak to each other.
This is a massive opportunity to accelerate the rollout of graded roads to clinics, connect developing settlements to the grid faster, and speed up the rebuilding of flood-damaged infrastructure. Better data lays no pipe by itself, yes, but it does decide whether the people laying the pipe know where to dig.
The percentage point we keep leaving on the table
There is a bigger prize, and I’ll put it as an opinion, because, for now, that is the most honest way to put it. In our view at AfriGIS, getting these foundations right – a shared language for location captured once and trusted everywhere – could add as much as a percentage point to South Africa’s GDP over time. The gain would come the slow way: thousands of sharper decisions, less duplicated effort, faster service delivery and a lower risk premium on loans and insurance policies that turn on knowing exactly where a property sits, and sits in relation to the many other factors that impact it. When the data underneath the economy stops contradicting itself, everything built on top of it can get cheaper and quicker to do.
AfriGIS has maintained location data to standards of this kind since 2002. It actively participated in shaping some of the standards now gazetted. So I can say with some confidence that compliance, done properly, turns a dot on a map into a fact you can build a budget on.
The standard is now gazetted and primed for the first stages of implementation. Whether it changes anything is, for once, in our hands. The industrial age rewarded the countries that agreed on their measurements quickly. South Africa has just agreed on how to measure its own ground more effectively. The work begins the moment we choose to read from the same map.
