National Address Gazetteer of Nigeria –N100million missed business opportunities for NIPOST & Office of the Surveyor General of the Federation

What is your Address?
If you are living in the UK, you would realise that your postcode is very important. You need your address and postcode to sign up for several essential services like home phone, home broadband, gas, electricity, water, registering your children for school enrolment, even to register at the local clinic your address is very important. Could they know every possible house in Great Britain?

Answers to these questions led me to Ordnance Survey’s Master Map Address Layer 2 database. This map database is Britain's most complete, comprehensive, national dataset of addresses and buildings and their precise locations. AL2 as this database is fondly called is a powerful address database for over 27million postal delivery points across Great Britain. These delivery points may be premises, buildings, etc

How was such a powerful database created? AL2 dataset was created by bringing 2 big British institutions to explore business opportunities for mutual benefits.

The consortium comprises:

• Ordnance Survey (OS is Great Britain's national mapping agency, providing the most accurate and up-to-date geographic data, relied on by government, business and individuals)
• Royal Mail (UK national postal agency with over 350 years of operational history)

Royal mail supplies the address database in the form of PAF (Postal Address File), OS simply attaches a GPS point to the address, this way each agency can focus on its area of core competence –very ingenious! AL2's annual turnover runs into several millions of Pounds.

Although OS as an institution has over 200 years of operational history, what most people do not know is that it was just in the last few years that OS started operating as a full fledge Trade Fund company –meaning that after the initial operational capital provided by the British Government, OS had not received any other money from the government but had been operating as a successful business entity making over £100million annually and contributing immensely to the British economy.

This AL2 database underpins millions of Pounds’ worth of decisions made by both public agencies and private sector of the economy especially:
• Banks
• Insurance Companies
• Utilities (Gas, electricity, telecom, water companies)
• Emergency Services Provider (Police, Ambulance, Fire Service, etc)
• Government (National, Counties, Local, Agencies, etc)
• Hospitals
• Etc.

This is a classical example of how institutions in Nigeria can work together towards a common goal.

Advanced Country or 3rd World Country?
In Nigeria, we relate addresses to a major landmark. It is very common for someone in Lagos to give his address as 14 Adana Close, behind the fire station near Ojuelegba. Although there is nothing inherently wrong in relating an address to a major landmark, it however makes it extremely difficult when your business depends on spatial element of your customers' addresses.

While government agencies and ministries in 3rd world countries see themselves as islands and therefore view data they gather as their exclusive right and property, agencies and ministries in advanced countries like UK encourage cooperation especially in the gathering and sharing of data for mutual benefits.

So what does it take to create Nigerian version of Address Layer2 or NAG?
Nigerian maping agency or Office of the Surveyor General of the Federation (OSOGF) is supposed to be the equivalence of UK’s OS while NIPOST is the Nigerian equivalence of UK’s Royal Mail. There are so many business opportunities in Nigeria that the Federal Survey and NIPOST can explore as a joint venture to their mutual benefit. Having NIPOST and Federal Survey come together to develop the Nigerian National Address Gazetteer (NAG) will touch the lives of millions of Nigerian in so many positive ways.
NAG can be a dataset that uniquely defines and locates residential, business and public postal addresses in Nigeria. It could be created by matching information from Nigerian Federal Survey digital map databases with millions of addresses recorded in NIPOST Postcode Address File.

NIPOST is already on the good path by creating a website that allows Nigerians to search for their postcodes - http://www.nigeriapostcodes.com/views The website even provides a list of streets sharing the same postcodes although I could not find my street on the website -meaning i still do not know my postcode. NIPOST needs to improve on this and make it more practical. I have enough expertise to implement a better online postcode finder using dynamic online map. (See what i did on LagosLocation.com ) I would be happy to offer my expertise in this regard if required :)

Nigerian maping agency or Office of the Surveyor General of the Federation (OSOGF) needs to wake up and smell the coffee. The era of pushing outdated paper maps produced before Nigerian independence in 1960 is over. Now we are in the era of Google Map, Yahoo Map, cloud computing, online map, Satellite Navigation, Location Base Services, etc. OSOGF needs to start thinking proactively. How can the website of the Office of the Surveyor General of the Federation that is "statutorily saddled with the responsibility of providing and coordinating surveying and mapping activities within the Federal Republic of Nigeria" host Google map? It is a disgrace to display maps of Nigeria developed by foreigners on the website of coordinator of all mapping projects in Nigerian!!What is wrong with OSOGF developing its own online map portal to show case maps produced by Nigerian professionals. This is a classic example of missed opportunities. LagosLocation.com is a good reference point to prove that there are Nigerian GIS experts and GIS programmers that can develop online map portals for the use of Nigerians. By working with such Nigerian online map portals OSOGF would be seen as the promoter of Nigerian skills and maps as well.

OSOGF could work with NIPOST to use on-the-ground GPS survey, aerial imagery and various other techniques to establish precise coordinates for each address and match this to the property on the map – effectively joining up postal and topographic geography, creating a fixed link between the property and its address. NAG can be a huge money spinner for both NIPOST and OSOGF that they do not need to go caps in hand to Abuja for grant every year again.

BENEFITS
NAG could be a fundamental tool in economic planning and management in Nigeria. It could meet the needs of governments in Nigeria at all levels as well as private businesses providing essential doorstep services – water, electricity and telecommunications – and the need to relate a customer or property to the support infrastructures in the street.





Power & Engergy
The current administration had identified Power as one of the most important economic issue to be resolved. Without an intelligent national address database, it would be very difficult for the power distribution companies to operate effectively. For example. what capacity of transformer is required to serve Ketu in Lagos effectively? It would be difficult to answer this and other operational questions if the number of houses in Ketu is not known. NAG can assist with this.

The findings of the power sub-committee of the Senate that probed the spending of billions of Naira on power during the regime of OBJ is a reference point to underscore the fact that spending money on power generation does not automatically translate to availability of uninterrupted power supply in Nigeria. We need intelligent data to assist in the optimal power distribution. One intelligent data that could help tremendously is this National Address Gazetteer

Companies like Southern Electric, npower, EDF Energy, e-on -all based in the UK have come to understand that effective power distribution is not possible without an intelligent National Address data, hence their heavy dependency on AL2.

Other Uses of NAG
Identified below are some other specific applications that could be enabled using the NAG

1. Health
• Targeting of services to population needs
• Resource allocation
• Epidemiology
• Analysis of What if...? scenarios

2. Insurance
• Market analysis and profiling
• Geological and flood-risk analysis
• Personal and household risk assessment
• Incident area management

3. Banking/Retail
• Sales analysis by store
• Competitor analysis
• Customer buying profiles
• Store location
• Targeting promotions

4. Power & Telecommunication
• Market profiling
• Consumption analysis
• Pressure-zone analysis
• Location finding

Conclusion
NAG will support sustainable development plans for a large part of Nigeria. NAG will be the most accurate and up-to-date geographic data, relied on by government, business and individuals in Nigeria. It will also encourage agencies to work together and become financially independent of the government. They would stop going to Abuja every year with cap in hand asking for money.

Ireti Ajala is a UK based Map Expert. He is the Managing Partner of Spatial Technologies Ltd –Nigeria’s foremost mapping and GIS Solution provider.