Today at the Radisson, it was all about networking on data use and data sharing. The Belize Association of Planners hosted a summit entitled Improving the Data Ecosystem for Governance Decision Making in Belize. SIB personnel, Urban developers and GIS consultants among other stakeholders presented at the event. Here is more about how impactful this collaboration will be for residents.
Carolyn Trench-Sandiford, President, Belize Association of Planners
"I think one of the challenges we face is development takes place, it is dynamic, it takes place over time but it often takes place in sectors so different people are doing different things on their own and we are not collaborating and when you are at the community level and neighborhood level you have then start talking about how you collaborate, how you network, how at the end of the day partners come together whether it is the state, the central government ,local government and getting the community involved in how you address the challenges that confront them because at that community level that is where the impact is felt."
"So the idea as planners our profession is a multi-disciplinary one, we always look at development in a holistic way, you need to look at people, you need to look at infrastructure, you also need to look at the ecosystems and then you have to look at the governance and often times decisions are taken externally and they are imposed on communities and often times when these decisions are made the community finds that it doesn't make any meaningful change in their lives and it doesn't address their issues so that came up with how can we access data and collaborate on data, yes there is a lot of data as you have seen from the presentations from SIB and they have all this data but we are not necessarily accessing it all and aware of it all it does so they have a role in terms of that kind of data and we have a role in using that data and identifying all the actors in that space and then how we collaborate and network and address key issues so if you are addressing poverty for example, you want to ensure that within the physical environment, people are living in decent homes, you need to ensure that at the end of the day, they can access their home through proper streets, you want to ensure when it rains the place doesn't flood, you want to ensure there is drainage, you want to ensure that the children have access to education, that they have places to play."
"What we are expecting at the end of the summit is one that we would have capacity among the participants of the summit because we are providing access and knowledge of data sources and we are looking at how we can use this data for more strategic interventions so we want to strengthen that collaboration build that capacity but at the same time what we are trying to do, the RTI is going to provide some strategic ways in which that networking can take place and how you can analyze data and use that data to become advocates in your own community."
It is a 2 year initiative and costs $320,000 US dollars. Among the stakeholders present at the summit was Belize City Mayor Bernard Wagner. He spoke about how important this project is to the city councils work.
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