$500k for Harare GIS project

Bianca Leboho Herald Reporter—

Harare City Council has allocated close to $500 000 to its Geographic Information System (GIS) strategy project, a move set to improve the authority’s operations and service delivery, officials have said.Addressing stakeholders from Harare City Council, Bulawayo City Council and partners from Munich in Germany, acting Harare town clerk who resumed work yesterday, Mrs Josephine Ncube said the GIS strategy was a data capturing system which would make it easier for the authority to identify problems and implement solutions.

“We are undertaking the project with assistance from our sister city of Munich together with the city of eThekwini and our peers from the city of Bulawayo council, a process facilitated by the partnership which exists between Harare and Germany.

“The project is concerned with the capturing of information through the use of hand- held gadgets which ensures that we have readily available information about our properties and resources which include water and roads,” she said.

She added that the project would improve service delivery especially in terms of planning and enforcement as it would facilitate the availability of information.

“We started implementing the project in May last year and our database had only 177 000 properties during that period, but as of now, the figure rose to about 265 000 properties,” said Mrs Ncube.