USAID-FinGAP

Context

I was awarded a USAID bid through the Financing Ghanaian Agriculture Project (FinGAP) to build a web-based mapping application in Northern Ghana that visualizes the entire agricultural supply chain, from farm to the end-user and everything in between. The goal of the application is to provide due diligence information to outside agricultural investors who often do not have enough data on Northern Ghana to make an informed investment decision.

Data

Shapefiles and CSV files with point data for all infrastructure sites in Northern Ghana; shapefiles with polygons for farms; and temporal data for production, hectares harvested, and yield down to the district level for a ten year period.

Tech Notes

As a second stage to the project, my team and I built a real-time SMS system where people on the ground in Ghana could text information about a new infrastructure site to a predetermined Ghanaian number and it would immediately appear in the admin section of the application. This crowdsourcing capability was also built into the application, so that a user can click on the map and add a new infrastructure site or edit an existing one.
The bulk of the front-end is built using a combination of jQuery, d3.js, and Google Maps.
The back-end technologies include PostgreSQL, PostGIS, Mapnik, Node.js, Express, Redis, and Fastly.

Live Demo

USAID-FinGAP