Blogs

Last Friday I had fun witnessing Diether Engelhard and Andreas Breitenstein pulling off four 1hr flawess flights in one day with their APM1 equipped X8 to map some 900 hectares of farmlands in Namibia. The X8 covered a total distance of 240km to provide high resloution aerial imagery - altogether some 9000 20MP images captured with a Samsung NX 1000 camera. This is a classic example of how small, private sector enterprise entrepreneurism and initiative can lead a country to self sufficiency in mapping. Instead of procuring in the expensive coorporate international markets, often advantaged by donor country governments or international finance institutions, Namibia can now turn to it's very own small enterprises to intelligently update and enhance geo-spatial information as and where needed. The true agents of technology transfer, innovative applications and capacity building in the developing world are unfortunately all too often overlooked by the international development sector.