Brian Civin, AfriGIS chief sales and marketing officer
This is a vital link for many businesses, such as those that want to expand their courier, retail, and financial services businesses across the continent.
“It is extremely difficult to source this type of data,” says Brian Civin, AfriGIS chief sales and marketing officer. “Our team has developed our polygon dataset for 21,000 towns, including 490,000 suburbs, over the past two years. A key differentiator is that it is verified and validated. Another are the numerous attributable data overlays we can use to enrich it via API.”
Many industries use geospatial data. Retailers such as fast food franchises use it to position outlets and improve their profitability. Couriers use it to improve first time delivery success rates. Banks and financial services use it for compliance, to understand their customer segments, position products and services. Governments use it for elections, service delivery and tax collection. Almost every industry and sector has a use case related to geospatial information and analyses.
“Business is conducted wherever there are people,” he says. “Understanding where people are and where business occurs is one part of the puzzle. What else happens at those locations is a major advantage to accelerate and unlock business opportunity. That’s what so many organisations want to tap into across Africa but which has been almost impossible to do until now.”
“Much of that opportunity is due to attributable data. It tells you what’s happening at a place,” says Civin. “We know where an outlet is and can represent that visually. We can overlay deeds data onto that, with income and other demographic data, plus traffic and weather patterns. That enables sophisticated modelling for retailers, for example. It’s so advanced they can use it to time special promotions related to holidays, weather patterns, and heavy traffic due to large-scale sporting events. Another example includes a media house that uses it to optimise distribution efficiencies and maximise marketing opportunities to generate revenues.”
Civin says the AfriGIS datasets will help organisations know and visualise suburb boundaries anywhere in Africa, which means they will be able to conduct business there. This despite the fact that many countries don’t support postal codes, which is an international standard for locating business relative to customers and operations.
Attributable overlays include information such as points of interest, administrative political boundaries, cadastral, deeds, and census data, street centrelines, postal code regions, sectional schemes, gated communities, built-up coverage, aggregated suburbs and more.
About AfriGIS
AfriGIS is the leading Geospatial Information Science company in Southern Africa that specialises in location-sensitive data and solutions. It provides customers across the board with a suite of web-based tools and APIs to connect to, enhance, and enrich their own data with location intelligence, insights, and trusted data. The organisation was founded in 1997 and celebrates 25 years in business this year. It is a level 1-certified broad-based black economic empowerment (B-BBEE) business, with more than 100 employees, in Pretoria, Durban and Cape Town in South Africa, Dublin in Ireland, and Dhaka in Bangladesh.
