Best Practices in Environmental Information Management in Africa

Linking the horizontal and vertical EIN All the EIN activities are carried out within the frame- work of Uganda’s obligations to national development goals and targets. Each node continues providing infor- mation support to national priorities such as the Poverty Eradication Action Plan (PEAP), which is Uganda’s pov- erty reduction strategy paper, the National State of the Environment Report (NSOER) and District State of the Environment Report (DSOER) processes. Figure 1 high- lights the linkages at the different levels. It also shows the links between the government policies and other en- vironmental information management instruments. In order to kick start the activities of the network at na- tional level, it was agreed that the 1:250,000 map sheet of Mbale should be revised as a collective pilot activity. Uganda is covered by about 17 map sheets at this scale. The Mbale map sheet, at that time, covered about 12 dis- tricts in total – some in their entirety while others only partially. Each participating institution had to digitize the information for the data they hold. After computeri- sation, district or other lower-level specific information could then be extracted or combined with data from other collaborating institutions for analysis as required. Over time, this was expanded to include the map sheets of Jinja (covering about 10 districts) and Kampala (ap- proximately 4 districts) at the same scale. The number of districts in each map sheet has now changed due to the formation of new districts. To build on the informa- tion within those map sheets, the network later worked on updating information of Kumi, Jinja and Luwero

Figure 1. Linkages between the horizontal and vertical environment information network Adapted from: UNEP/NEMA 2004

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Best Practices in Environmental Information Management in Africa