Geographic Information Systems (GIS) can assist in using information from census data to investigate questions
for national and local government planning purposes, such as socio-economic profiles and needs of
communities. I will be doing this on the data from the Ethiopian census, scheduled for 2006. . As no Ethiopian
geo-referenced data is available at this stage. I am using the 10% sample of the South African Census 2001 data
for KwaZulu-Natal (KZN), as a hypothetical population. KZN was chosen as this provides a setting with urban
and rural populations, as well as mountainous and flat areas, and so is in some ways similar to Ethiopia.
The questions to be asked of the Ethiopian census data are of the form:
· What exists at a specific location or in a specific area? (eg what health facilities are there, what is the
population)?
· What access does the population have to facilities in the area? Does the road network need to be improved
to resolve the problem of access
· Where are groups of people in greatest need of … (eg where are there clusters of people with disabilities,
and are there facilities for them)
· What are the characteristics of ... (eg female headed households) and what are these related to (eg HIV/AIDS
or migrant labour?)
· What changes need to be made to infrastructure to increase service to communities in need?
The results for the hypothetical population show that there are areas with high unemployment rates, low school
attendance and education levels, high levels of female headed household, and difficulties of access to
educational and health facilities. Many households do not have toilet facilities, and obtain water from rivers,
which could impact on the health of the communities. Migrant workers were investigated to see if these were
likely to be migrants from neighbouring countries, or from other provinces. The numbers in the hypothetical
population in these cases are small, so little can be concluded from this.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:wits/oai:wiredspace.wits.ac.za:10539/5790 |
| Date | 22 October 2008 |
| Creators | Sahle, Sisay Guta |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | application/pdf, application/pdf |
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