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Economic Development

Building Bridges to Progress: The Inter-American Development Bank’s HIT Platform for Infrastructure and Transport

Across Latin America and the Caribbean, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) plays a pivotal role in financing sustainable, social, economic, and institutional development. With a mission to support transportation and infrastructure projects across South and Central America, the IDB collaborates with various partners to drive positive change in the region.

Blue Raster collaborated with the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) to develop the Hub de Integracion y Transporte (HIT) Platform, a groundbreaking initiative that serves as a regional infrastructure and transport hub, consolidating and presenting crucial information layers for effective planning and decision-making.

IDB HIT Platform

The HIT Platform offers an innovative solution by providing a comprehensive platform that combines key information related to infrastructure, logistics, value chains, projects, climate change, Covid impacts, and development perspectives. This platform acts as a powerful planning tool and an invaluable information repository, catering to the needs of government officials, Mesoamerican stakeholders and IDB specialists. The HIT Project is divided into six modules, each utilizing the robust capabilities of the ArcGIS Online suite of solutions and incorporating custom-developed features to address specific requirements. Recognizing the linguistic diversity of the region, all modules of the HIT Platform were developed in Spanish. The HIT Platform encompasses a series of interactive web applications and dashboards developed with ArcGIS Online and ArcGIS Dashboards.

IDB HIT Platform IDB HIT Platform

The HIT Platform offers a personalized user experience by incorporating customized list and pop-up elements. These interactive components allow users to access specific information related to infrastructure, logistics, and value chains conveniently. By tailoring the user interface to meet specific requirements, the platform enhances usability and efficiency. To enable intuitive data visualization, the HIT platform project utilizes data-driven symbology, a feature within ArcGIS, to dynamically represent information based on various attributes. ArcGIS Arcade expressions, a flexible scripting language within ArcGIS, are employed extensively throughout the HIT project to ensure accurate and consistent data cleaning and formatting. By leveraging Arcade expressions, the platform achieves seamless integration and harmonization of diverse datasets, enhancing data quality and reliability.

Through its effective utilization of ArcGIS Online and its suite of applications and customization options, the HIT Platform sets a benchmark for effective planning and information management in the region, fostering positive change and driving sustainable growth.

Advancing Sustainable Development in West Africa: A Geospatial Toolkit for Monitoring SDG Goals

In 2015, United Nations Member States adopted the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, a shared blueprint for global peace and prosperity now and into the future. Within the core of this agenda are 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) which call all countries to action in a global partnership.

Goal 15 of the Sustainable Development Goals outlines a plan to protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, and halt and reverse land degradation and biodiversity loss

As part of its initiatives in West Africa, the MIT Media Lab partnered with the Biospheric Sciences Lab at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and Blue Raster to develop a desktop-based geospatial toolkit for calculating and reporting key indicators within Goal 15 of the SDGs. These key indicators are:

  • Forest area as a proportion of total land area
  • Proportion of important sites for terrestrial and freshwater biodiversity that are covered by protected areas, by ecosystem type.
  • Coverage by protected areas of important sites for mountain biodiversity.

Blue Raster developed these tools in a custom toolbox using ArcGIS Pro and the ArcGIS Python site package, ArcPy to calculate the key indicators for countries in the West African region namely: Nigeria, Ghana, Liberia, Togo, Benin, Guinea, and Botswana. The tool leverages remotely sensed imagery and standardized datasets to inform and provide decision making support to West African stakeholders as well as stakeholders within the academic community supporting the UN’s Sustainable Development agenda.

Blue Raster is long time partner of the MIT Media Lab and had previously partnered with the MIT Media Lab and Green Keeper Africa to develop the Lake Nokoué Environmental Observatory application, an online mapping that provides the public with current and historic information about water quality and invasive species in Lake Nokoué. The online observatory and decision support tool utilizes satellite, aerial and ground data to map water quality readings, as well as the location of water hyacinth and a fish farming practice known as “acadja” over time.

Green Keeper Africa – Utilizing Invasive Plant Species to Mitigate Lake Pollution in Benin

The water hyacinth is an invasive aquatic plant found in Lake Nokoué in the southern area of Benin. This plant grows rapidly, forming thick layers on the water, shading out other plants. As it decays, it depletes oxygen levels, impacting the fish and other aquatic life in the lake. In addition to the ecological impacts, the hyacinth also has economic impacts, clogging up transportation routes. The hyacinth fiber has a high-performance absorption power for all types of liquids, from dyes to crude oil and heavy fuel oil. Green Keeper Africa created a transformation path that takes harvested hyacinths and converts them into an absorptive product that can soak up oil spills.

Building an Economic Engine

In order to produce the absorption solutions, Green Keeper Africa works with local communities to collect and prepare the hyacinth for production. The company needed more visibility into the growth patterns to be able to set pricing each season and direct harvesters to the most abundant areas.

Blue Raster developed an application that uses an algorithm to detect water hyacinth in satellite imagery. The application also gathers data from water sensors currently being prototyped by MIT as well as other ground data and water quality readings. Green Keeper uses this view of real time and historic data to fairly set prices and plan for harvest areas they need to support.

Green Keeper Africa

Beyond Hyacinth Tracking

This application can help promote additional sustainable and profitable uses of Lake Nokoué. Acadja is a fishing method where dense masses of branches are set in an area to attract fish in large numbers for harvesting. The Blue Raster application can use footage from drones to map the placement of the Acadjas, overlaying that information with other data to track environmental impacts and/or present alternate locations or methods that may result in more fish with less environmental impact.

Contact us to learn more about how Blue Raster can customize applications for you!

 

Mekong Monitor – Providing Vital Insight for River-dependent Communities

The Mekong River runs through six countries: China, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, and Cambodia, and Vietnam. It provides a livelihood and natural resources for over 60 million people. New upstream dams in China are changing the waterflow, creating a huge impact on the countries and people that depend on the river. Using the Mekong Dam Monitor as a tool, the Stimson Center’s Southeast Asia Program and Eyes on Earth, Inc committed to working with countries to gain more visibility into the flow of the river and better plan for water availability.

Mekong MonitorBlue Raster developed the Mekong Dam Monitor to provide unprecedented transparency of the flow of water and conditions of dams and reservoirs along the Mekong River. Using satellite data as well as weather and water gauge data, the monitor provides visibility into what is happening upstream, giving a comprehensive near-real time view of the current state of the Mekong basin along with historic conditions. This allows people all along the river and those advocating for more equitable and sustainable use of the river to understand and plan for changes in the levels of the river.

Mekong Monitor

In late 2021, Blue Raster integrated WordPress into the application, making it easier for the project administrators to make updates to the site themselves. The site also received an update to the UI, making it more mobile friendly to support growing field use. Finally, the team also coordinated making the site available in six local languages, increasing the access to this valuable data on water levels and projected water flow.

Mekong Monitor

Blue Raster is proud to continue to support this project, providing real time visibility and reporting on impacts of up river decisions on the various communities that rely on the Mekong.

Innovation 2.0: Draper Innovation Index launches new version

Following up on the previous versions of the Draper Innovation Index (DII), Blue Raster is proud to announce the launch of the Draper Innovation Index Global 2.0. According the the Draper Hero Institute (DHI) the ArcGIS Hub site “will be the first index of its kind to be updated monthly to reflect the most current state of the ever-evolving state of economic opportunities, economic freedom for innovators, entrepreneurs, and investors around the globe.”

A collaboration between DHI and Blue Raster, the Draper Innovation Index consists of ArcGIS Dashboards, StoryMaps and Hub.

What is new in this Draper Hero Institute update:

  • The DII Global’s Government Quality category now incorporates the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index, which evaluates nations based on five indicator categories: electoral processes and pluralism, government functioning, political participation, political culture and civil liberties. First published in 2006, the Democracy Index draws on survey questions and expert analysis and is updated quarterly. It classifies nations into four categories: full democracies, flawed democracies, hybrid regimes, and authoritarian regimes.
  • The DII’s new Country Sentiment Index, a proprietary DII algorithm, incorporates three main components:
  • S&P Dow Jones’ Global Equity Indices, which measures changes in equity markets, in a specific country or region;
  • Currency fluctuations in relation to the price of Bitcoin;
  • The World Uncertainty Index (WUI), created by International Monetary Fund and Stanford University economists in 2018 as “the first effort to construct a panel index of uncertainty for a large set of developed and developing countries.”

Tim DraperThese additions enable the DII Global to better accomplish its core mission, providing a global look at which countries and regions have the freest economies and the best, most supportive environments for innovation, entrepreneurship, and investment,” said DHI Founder Tim Draper. “This knowledge is more important now than ever, as the competition for employers, skilled workforce, and capital has only become fiercer since governments now need to compete globally for innovators.

Make sure to revisit the DII Global each month to see how rankings continue to shift based on the most current data.


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