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Geo-Referencing & Cleansing Election Database – Chad/2010

Guy Maurice
Guy Maurice

This project was commissioned by Information Management and Mine Action Programs (iMMAP) who is assisting the Chadian Independent National Electoral Commission (CENI) in Chad. The goals of this project were to geo-reference +/-10,000 polling stations for the entire country and then add attribute data such as type of polling station, mobile network operator available, accessibility, and time to reach from the sub-district center to that dataset. This dataset should have been used for the preparation of the upcoming legislative elections due in September 2010. Unfortunately the mission has been postponed/cancelled as the work as the data were not efficient. I believe iMMap is still waiting for a commitment from the CENI to provide better data for spatial referencing and/or support to spatially locate the polling stations. The CENI by the time was quite busy with the election census and the communication was barely possible between the CENI and iMMAP. Indeed, we needed better quality data as for spatial reference. With the data received we could hardly reference by manually linking one by one about 50% (max. 5 000 out of ~10 000) of the polling stations. 10% (about 900 polling stations) only could be automatically linked based on the village name and the rest still needed to be annually linked (about9 000). About 1 500 polling stations had no village linked to it, which made them impossible to map. I must confess I was a bit frustrated not having the possibility to end this mission nevertheless that was a great experience in the end as I have been involved in my first volunteer mission, I have been in contact with several NGO and I had the opportunity to give my expertise on geographical data.

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