| dc.description.abstract | Good camp management is essential to ensure that the rights and needs of displaced people
living in a camp, refugee or internally displaced, are guaranteed and adhered to. Camp
management includes a variety of tasks in different sectors: provision of security, water, food,
shelter, health, sanitation, education and other social amenities and often involves many
actors, such as the national governments, the local authorities, united nations agencies, non
governmental organisations and the displaced persons. Camp management is performed in
various ways depending on, among others, funding, available expertise and on the availability
and quality of data.
It is always necessary to manage information about who is living in the camp and the
infrastructure in the camp (shelter, schools, health clinics, water points, latrines, etc).
Combined, registration and spatial databases provide critical information that facilitates camp
management. Visualizing this information on a map does not only provide the figures and
statistics necessary to analyze the situation in the camp, but can also be used to propose
solutions. A camp map combined with information about the population is therefore a tool
that can be used for planning and decision making and can help in allocating the resources in
the most efficient way.
This project endevoured to extend the capability of the existing UNHCR’s GIS system based
on Google Earth to enable refugee camp managers use the technology in their daily
management activities, allowing for visualization, planning, informed decision making and
updating of the data and sharing the same with GIS Experts. Based on the data that existed,
Google Earth files were created for the three camps; Dagahaley, Hagadera and Ifo,
incorporating the main features within the camps and shared with one manager at the camp
for testing. Given his knowledge of the camps, this link person identified features that were
missing and those that had changed. He acknowledged the ease with which he was able to
learn the system and use it. It is recommended that a training on the use of Google Earth be
undertaken to camp managers so that they can make full use of the system. | en |
