The World Bank rural infrastructure inspections
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The World Bank and the Ministry of Education and Training in Lesotho subscribes to infrastructure inspections from the Globhe platform to map 25 school building sites in rural areas. By utilizing local drone operators who speak the language, are familiar with the terrain, and have all the necessary licensing, Globhe made the captured data available in 48 hours.
This project set out to monitor the construction of school buildings and improve access to primary school education and provide essential sanitary services in remote areas. Before using Globhe, a team had to trek to each site. Given how rural these areas are, that was logistically challenging to perform inspections.
“By the time we had got the solutions to the problems enacted with schools, months had gone by in between, so we really needed a way to fill that gap,” Tshegofatso Thulare says, education specialist.
They went from relying solely on reports written by engineers, combined with Whatsapp photos that would get crisscrossed, making it hard to distinguish which structure is which and determining the need for each building site, to a near real-time solution in a single platform.
“It made all those things unambiguous, so we were all talking of the same script, which is also really helpful as a project team,” Thulare explains.
Infrastructure is one of the many industries where drone data is vital to progress tracking and project management. Tshegofatso Thulare says they are looking into how to systematize it for similar projects with a variety of stakeholders.
“I think more than anything. It's the amount of information that it's helped us gather and be able to make informed decisions. I think the senior management in the organization, including within the Ministry of Education, the amount of relief they feel to be able to actually see the progress,” says Thulare.
