Annual review meeting

Board members for our planning authority and us, the secretariats, came to a lodge at the outskirts of Lusaka for our annual review meeting. We discussed about what we have achieved in the year of 2011 and what kind of activities / projects we should focus on this year.

I needed to make a presentation about our use and application of GIS in 2011 and proposed GIS activities in 2012 at the department. There are variety of things that I want to do by using GIS, including GIS training to the staff here, improving our GIS database, collecting and creating necessary shapefiles for our jurisdiction, and so on. As I only have a little longer than a year left here, I should consider which tasks need to be prioritized before starting new projects.

I guess the annual review meeting was a success. There were so many issues that needed to be discussed... Of course I learned quite a bit from the meeting, but, to be honest, I was glad when the two-day long meeting was finally over!

GIS workshop was postponed!

Since last November, my colleague and I had been working quite hard to hold a two-week long GIS training from the end of January to early February. Twenty planners / planning assistants / surveyors all over the country were supposed to come to Lusaka for that. We even wrote a training material (more than 130 pages long!) so that the participants could practice using GIS on their own even after the training. We were about to place an order for the printing when we were informed of BAD news...

The training has been suddenly postponed until the end of next month because an administrative issue occurred. The worst of it was that it might get cancelled if the situation did not improve by a certain day. Although I knew there was nothing we could have done about it, I was really sad and disappointed about the decision. It was scheduled to start within a week!

I had been very busy ever since we started to organize the event. Besides from writing the training guide, I visited some professionals / offices to organize the event and deal with issues, as well as submitted a proposal, just to name a few... I was so ready for it.

I really wished we could have hold the training as we planned. Though, at least, I was able to learn how it is to work in a developing country in a hard way. I only hope I could react better if a similar thing ever happens to me next...

New Year's Resolution

Happy New Year!

So many things happened to me in the year of 2011, good and bad things alike. Overall, though, I think I am enjoying my life in Zambia and glad to have an opportunity to work as a planner here.

As the life in Zambia is so much slower and I have more time here, I have a lot of things that I want to do this year:
- To complete the Luangwa IDP
- To start the Kafue IDP project and finish the inception report as well as the status quo report
- To improve the GIS database at the office
- To make the DPPH GIS training a successful one
- To continue the GIS workshop at the office
- To study GRE in order to apply for grad schools
- To start learning a new language (preferably French)
- To travel to Tanzania and Mozambique, etc

But I think my new year's resolution will be to stay healthy. It is very simple but I think it is very important since I need to be healthy to achieve all those things mentioned above.

Anyways, I hope the year 2012 will be a prosperous one for all of us...

Stakeholder Consultation in Luangwa

I went to Luangwa from August 7 - 12 for stakeholder consultation for the Luangwa IDP. It was my first time being there, so I was a bit nervous before going there.

After I got there, though, I fell in love with the small yet beautiful township. It still contained a lot of nature with beautiful scenery as well as some commercial activities such as tourism and fishing. 

Now I feel so proud to be involved in the development projects for the Luangwa District. I cannot wait to go back there sometime soon :)

Luangwa IDP

Recently, I have been working on the Luangwa Integrated Development Plan (IDP) with my coworkers. The IDP is a multidimensional planning approach to fulfill the overall development of the specific area, including physical, social, economic and institutional sectors. This plan will be used to guide the growth, development and management of Luangwa District effectively.

The Luangwa IDP project has started in 2008 but we are still at the second phase of the development (we are actually combining the second phase and the third / last phase, so we are getting close to complete the project). We are really hoping to finish it by the end of this year so that we can focus on the IDP for the remaining districts.

Among those components of the phase 2 (Spatial Development Framework), I focused on the formulation of the spatial development framework. All the three proposals, in detail three kinds of land use maps as well as infrastructure maps, for the IDP were done by the time I started working here. Although I was assigned to write an entire chapter about those proposals by myself, it was not as easy since I was not there when those proposals were made and needed to assume quite a lot of things by examining those maps.

Fortunately, my coworkers were kind enough to help me out and gave me a lot of inputs. So, I managed myself to finish writing the chapter.

Of course I was aware that he write-ups that I did was just a zero draft and needs to be edited. However, I was quite happy that I did something at least to hep develop the district of Luangwa in a long run!

Parceling

My colleagues and I are currently working on parceling subdivisions for LS-MFEZ. Since the land use plan as well as the layout plan for the phase 1 development were done by a consulting company, our department are expected to design the subdivisions only for the phase 2 - 4.

I am enjoying the project fully because the subdivisions that we are recently designing would be built in the real world. So far, we are somewhat done with parceling for the phase 2. We should be able to be done with it soon though (hopefully!).

It, however, requires a lot of patience as we have to keep adjusting the parcels little by little. For instance, it took us about 3 working days to finish parceling for the industrial area just in the phase 3. Because of the task, I am more interested in physical planning per se.

The project is supposed to be done sometime after 2030. I hope to see the economic zone in the real world as soon as possible :)

LS-MFEZ presentation

I needed to give a presentation about the master plan for LS-MFEZ in front of the board members and some stakeholders of the project at the special technical committee meeting today.

As this project needed to be approved by the planning board as soon as possible, my colleagues and I had worked quite hard on preparing for the presentation and creating the GIS maps that were relevant to the topics; development phases, land use, infrastructures and service lines.

It was actually my first presentation that I needed to deliver in Zambia, so I was nervous a bit until this morning. However, since there were some dramas before the meeting, such as no projectors to show the powerpoint slides, the plotter was not working properly to print out 27 maps for the board members, etc, I somehow felt so confident to deliver the presentation. In fact, I enjoyed explaining about the project to the stakeholders who were there at the meeting.

It turned out that people in the meeting liked my presentation as well as my boss and colleagues. They told me that I did good job today and should do another presentation for IDP report when we go on a business trip at the end of this month or early next month. Can't wait :)