Solar Village Project Feasibility/Planning Tool

At www.developmentmaps.org, we've built a semi-manual software tool that maps the location of households in offgrid villages. This helps visualize for investors what a small solar lending project might look like in a developing country, and makes it more investable.

The process involves the following steps, which we would like to automate as much as possible via this hackathon:

1) Job Location: a client inputs the target village/region they want to develop their rural infrastructure project in (solar, water, whatever), and the km radius around this central point within which they'd like us to map all visible households

2) Mapping Job Preparation: this area is broken into 100m x 100m "tiles" of satellite imagery, and the centroid of each tile is sent offshore for low cost workers to map for us (currently we generate these centroids ourselves in desktop GIS software)

3) Data Creation: The mappers place markers on every visible building in the area, and our OpenLayers code (which we can share with hackers) generates the latitude and longitude of each point. Mappers email back to us these lat/long house co-ordinates, and note any tiles that could not be mapped (cloud cover, no imagery, etc). Unmapped households have now been mapped (in csv format)

4) We quality check this data (sometimes there's duplicate points near tile edges, or missed households), and then send to the client (in csv format and more easily viewed kml format). The client may also want additional data assessed for this, such as a) for a product from a given database of suppliers, how much would it cost to get all households solar power for the given area; b) for a given weekly tariff per household and given % interest rate, how long would it take to pay off the project? If this is less than 3 years, typically it is then an investable project.

We can send all the tools and Excel sheets we use now to manually go through these steps, but we hope it would be relatively to create an enhanced version of the www.developmentmaps.org website so that this process could be done largely without manual work from VIA staff, but just task control steps (eg. approve a requested project for mapping by mappers, approve the quality-checked dataset and financial assessment for release to client/investors).

If this of interest, please email me at stewart@villageinfrastructure.org

Good luck with the event!

Regards,
Stewart Craine
www.villageinfrastructure.org
www.developmentmaps.org