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TopIntroduction – Motivation And Significance
Address and location information are among essential information needed for mobility and access to social, economic and cultural opportunities. Accessing them, however, have often been a challenge. Although this challenge is a global one, it is more heightened in Sub-Sahara Africa due to the lack of standardized address system, limited street names, and poor spatial referencing of landmarks (Coetzee and Cooper, 2007; Dumedah, 2021; Dumedah and Garsonu, 2021; Farvacque-Vitkovic et al., 2005; Universal Postal Union, 2012). Other drivers of the problem in Ghana include inadequate spatial planning leading to poor layout of roads and informal settlements. This lack of readily available and updated location data presents major socioeconomic problems in Ghana including incidences of fatal accidents and asset/utility failure (Dumedah, 2017; Dumedah and Eshun, 2020). Accordingly, this study seeks to address the question of how existing and scarce location data can be improved to facilitate mobility for all population groups.
Location data is vital in accessibility and service delivery. For example, in an emergency, medical care will be needed at a specific location; businesses advertise their locations to customers; and governments need location data on businesses/people for revenue collection. Also, the current COVID-19 pandemic has underscored the practical need for location data for contact tracing, identification of vulnerable communities for support, and the delivery of food and medical supplies. But the delivery of these services is problematic in Ghana and most of Sub-Sahara Africa, resulting in accidents, loss of revenue and asset/utility failure because of unreliable and lack of location data. Location data has become crucial for businesses and the general public, particularly as an important avenue for digital jobs which require the use of digital maps for navigation and service delivery. For example, Uber is a popular taxi service and Google Map is widely used for navigation and location services, both requiring the use of digital maps.
Moreover, the high density of urban road network (Daia et al., 2018; Hu et al., 2018; Sarraf and McGuire, 2018; Sharifi, 2019) makes it difficult to navigate or travel without knowledge of the local area or a working knowledge of digital maps. Currently, digital maps are integrated into almost any smartphone, making them ubiquitous and a new common knowledge for businesses, industry and travel. The afore-mentioned societal challenges highlight the increasing demand for digital maps, and knowledge of their usage and working principles. But reliable and accurate location data are needed to generate useful digital maps for service delivery and navigation in Ghana and most of Sub-Sahara Africa. The digital maps available through data services such as Google and Uber do not provide detailed location coverage over Ghana and most of Sub-Sahara Africa for local navigation and service delivery. More so, these available location data services mainly use English as the medium of communication, making them inaccessible to some sections of the population without formal education. This creates a digital divide and socially exclude some sections of the population from access to services.
Given the lack of adequate location data in Ghana, data sources such as Google Map, and OpenStreetMap (OSM) are the ones widely used. Several businesses, national and local government agencies rely on these data in providing services. Both Google Map and OSM information are largely derived from satellite imagery and volunteered data. Accordingly, they lack local detail to provide reliable location information for geocoding purposes (Mertel et al., 2021), travel planning, and emergency services such as police, ambulance and firefighting operations. Nevertheless, Google Map and OSM are the most widely used spatial data in Ghana and most of Sub-Sahara Africa given their extensive coverage.