Department of Planning Monitoring and Evaluation stands to benefit from best practice

THE MERCURY

- Dr Pali Lehohla is a Professor

Unfortunately there was no funding for this strategic asset.

THE REAL NUMBERS

PALI LEHOHLA

lation counting, and economic analysis, IBGE generated the foundational data and spatial understanding necessary for later GIS applications, which were further influenced by the arrival of quantitative mathematical techniques and GIS specialists in the late 1960s.

Brazil had also embedded informatics in its statistical infrastructure. The informatics component, however, was dropped at a later date for reasons that will not be discussed. But informatics is an essential element of decision support in the world of big data, data revolution, and especially artificial intelligence.

The focus on geography strengthened the Brazilian authorities to organically embed the spatial dimension in the statistics institution as an integral component of planning.

In the United States where statistics are decentralised, a significant integrator of data are the shapefiles of the United States Bureau of the Census.

These are called the TIGER (Topologically Integrated Geographic Encoding & Referencing).