For international development agencies, timely and accurate geospatial data is an essential tool for evidence-based decision-making. Yet gathering, analyzing, and presenting geospatial data is a complex and time-consuming activity that requires a specialized skill-set.

This presentation shares the experience of an Innovation Challenge project implemented at the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) - a specialized UN agency and financial institution. The main goal was to minimize the time and knowledge required to gather and process a vast array of relevant geospatial layers, providing a standardized approach applicable to every country of operation in IFAD’s activities. This objective was achieved via the implementation of automation procedures using open source tools, which resulted in a reduction of the required processing time by a factor of 40 (from 2 weeks to 2 hours).

GeoScan is based entirely on an open-source technological stack and uses the latest, verified data sources, providing various levels of users with different information products: automated pdf atlases, ready-to-use GIS data, metadata and web services, web applications, and an interactive user dashboard.

The project included the following activities:

1. Data needs evaluation, relevant to the international development sector and aligned with IFAD’s strategy in the agricultural environment in rural areas.

2. Literature and data review to match the identified data needs.

3. Data selection, validation, and detailed documentation on the selected geospatial layers.

4. Data standardization and ontology with automated processing for data structuring, visualization, and statistics calculation.

5. Preparation and generation of automated country reports and structuring the data in GIS data packages.

6. Integration with the enterprise GIS infrastructure in IFAD.

7. Development of interactive web GIS application and dashboard.

The project made extensive use of QGIS, GDAL, Postgre/PostGIS, Geonode, Geoserver, and OpenLayers.