- 21 - CEO Today Global Awards 2023 - UGANDA - gaps, internet connectivity, access to credit and capital, human resource, institutional capacities, access to national spatial data, duplication of GIS data and inconsistent spatial data sets. The Geospatial Knowledge Infrastructure (GKI) Readiness Index - 2022, underscores the need for different governments globally to create an integrated policy framework to ensure that their nations establish the environment for a digital economy and society that utilizes location. At the continental level, the Africa Union continues to support the industry through policy, establishment of the African Space Agency, and supporting and implementing different earth observation and geospatial development programs in line with the Africa Union Agenda 2063. In my view, this is a fundamental shift and an indicator that technological innovations are being considered key to spur development and uplift the living conditions of people on the continent. At an international level, individual governments are also developing infrastructure and policies that facilitate technological innovation. While the pace might vary from one country to another, some governments have moved faster and developed data standards, integrated geospatial information, provide policy guidelines, and recognise spatial data as an asset for development. For example, the government of Uganda is working through the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovationwith the support of partners to spearhead numerous efforts including the recent launch of the PearlAfrica Sat1 satellite in space in November 2022, adding to the already existing satellites in the obit owned by other African countries. The industry is also evolving and rapidly moving away from traditional GIS mapmaking practices to a wide range of methods, software, analytics, robust tools, artificial intelligence, machine learning and other agile applications. I think different business enterprises and institutions are increasingly realising the need to harness the capabilities in geospatial technologies for their work by adopting spatial databases, software apps, dashboards, smartphones, tablets, drones and cloud computing and consuming lots of satellite data. Despite competition in the industry, I really think there is increased collaboration amongst the industry players in the entire space and GIS ecosystem right from the upstream to manufacturing, downstream, governments, other PanAfrican state institutions and the rest of the world. More African enterprises are collaborating through partnerships with other global industry players – which in my opinion is necessary to grow the entire space and GIS ecosystem, fuel enterprise competitiveness, spur technological transfer and develop the operational capacity of indigenous SMEs and startups. At user and consumer level, hundreds of industry players are utilising geospatially driven data and products for their dayto-day operational work and decisions; producing and sharing millions of maps daily, telling diverse stories, trends and relationships, but also as means of sharing information products for decision-making. I believe there is also a fast-rising uptake of open-source tools and applications. A lot of data and user-friendly tools are available to enable professionals and users to gain access for their operations at zero cost. Commercial players in the GIS and satellite industry have also revolutionised the science of data acquisition and delivery to the end user. This has improved greatly user experiences and enabled access to data at low cost. Internally, to adapt and entrench in the industry, we launched new products and services by deeply anchoring geo-ICT and geospatial solutions core to our mainstream product portfolios.
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