Rural Development Study

SiQ was awarded the Rural Development Study project by Urban Dynamics Town and Regional Planners. The purpose of the project was the capturing of data related to the infrastructure, services, community facilities and housing conditions of people living in settlements on rural property in the Nkangala District Municipality. The final output for Urban Dynamics was to provide strategically placed nodes to develop rural villages with accessible infrastructure, services and acceptable living conditions to cater for the landless. The project started in March 2007 and was completed in July 2007.

The project entailed the placement of geo-referenced points on settlements on rural property from aerial photography and the capturing of data at these points for specific municipalities.

Experienced field workers had to navigate themselves with GPS units to the placed points. Data such as farm owner name, land use of adjacent properties, number of households, type and state of structures and villages, population count, types of services at the settlement etc was captured. A photo was also taken of each of the settlements to capture the general state of the settlement.

As on all SiQ projects, a holistic view was taken and systems were put in place to assist with the project.

The field workers were issued with GPS units connected to handheld IPAQ Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) containing ESRI ArcPad software that was customized in-house. Training was given on how to operate the GPS, PDA and what data had to be captured.

The development of the personal digital assistance instrument (PDA) software was done in such a manner that data could be captured in a quick and efficient manner in a way that would maximise the Quality Assurance with minimum effort.

Data was downloaded daily in the field and sent to the office to be checked. One of the most important aspects to ensure quality information on the project was the daily checking of the information received from the field to make sure that feedback on any problems was given to the field workers speedily. Re-evaluation and improvement of processes took place as required ensuring that all problems were eliminated. This substantially reduced the amount of quality assurance that needed to be done at the end of the project.

SiQ is completely geared with the necessary skills in terms of project management, software development, field surveying and quality assurance to undertake surveys of this kind.