Road map of project sites in Upper West Ghana

This road map was a request by the Ghana Institute of Horticulture to members of the Canadian Agricultural Rural Extension Society (C.A.R.E.S.). Commercial maps in rural Africa tend not to include smaller villages, and so road maps for rural areas are typically hand drawn and localized. This kind of map is insufficient for the practicalities of monitoring multiple project sites over more than one district.

We had previously extracted the geographical co-ordinates for small villages in Lake Zone, Tanzania by bringing a hand-held GPS into the field, but at the time of the above request there was no funding available for this kind of venture. So we improvised. Many of the places to be mapped had co-ordinates available in digital format online, and those that were not available in this way could be identified on Google Earth in terms of proximity: “X miles south-east of Y village along public road number Z”. A “thumbtack” could be placed on the Google Earth map, converted to a digital format and then brought into the map. Of course, feedback by people living in the area was necessary to ensure that the placements were accurate.

The road data retrieved from an online source was an almost exact match with the satellite data on Google Earth – only a small amount of updating was necessary. More up-to-date road information on a local scale can be acquired later by means of a hand-held GPS.

As with the previous map, this one was also created using QuantumGIS, a free, open-source mapping application. Open source software is always a work in progress, but much more financially accessible to locals in Ghana than the commercial GIS software in widespread use across North America.