We have been working with the Alliance for Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) for many years and it was our great pleasure to get the opportunity to travel to Nairobi, Kenya to meet many of the AGRA team members in person. AGRA works very hard at making a positive impact in many African communities, and we at SpatialDev are excited to partner with them to create a public application that assists in visualizing these impacts in an interactive and informative manner.

One of the goals of this project is to be able to provide the public with near real time information. In order to achieve this, we will need to pull information programmatically from AGRA’s internal information system. While in Nairobi, we were able to meet with all the key personnel for both AGRA and their information systems vendor to formulate and devise a plan to achieve this goal. We left the meeting feeling like we all clearly understood the requirements and tasks ahead.

We are planning to utilize the Portfolio Mapping Tool (PMT) platform to provide AGRA with the visualization tools needed to deliver a quality web application that will present the public with AGRA’s live data. This application will allow users to spatially view grant activities on an interactive map, explore the relationships between organizations funding and implementing grants, and view impacts at various boundary levels (country and region). The PMT is built using open source technologies such as Postgres, Node.js, Angular.js, Grunt, Leaflet, MapGL and several others.

We were lucky enough to get an opportunity to explore some of the many amazing places around Nairobi. We got up close and personal with the giraffes at the Giraffe Center. We watched the orphaned baby elephants getting hand fed at the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust Orphan Project. We toured the Nairobi National Park and saw a number of animals and wildlife, including a Simba (Swahili for lion) and a black Faru (Swahili for rhino). On our last day, we visited the Nairobi Animal Orphanage and were lucky enough to get to feed and pet a male lion, leopard, cheetah, and a few monkeys. It was absolutely amazing.

Our entire trip was an experience that I will remember forever.