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EDITOR IN CHIEF- ABDULLAH BIN SALIM AL SHUEILI

Benin leaps into 21st century with new national map

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Delphine Bousquet -


The last time that cartographers mapped Benin, Elvis Presley had just released “Jailhouse Rock,” the Soviets had launched Sputnik — and the country was still a colony named French Dahomey. Things in the West African state have sure changed since 1957, and the old maps were left in the dust as the population nearly quadrupled and cities and towns expanded relentlessly.


Today, though, map-makers are proud to unveil a 21st-century digital chart that they hope will serve Benin for many years, helping to guide development and preserve its environment. “It’s the first complete map of (post-colonial) Benin, from the (Atlantic) ocean in the south to the Niger river in the north,” says Roch Bah, director of the National Geographical Institute (IGN) of Benin.


“And we are the first country in French-speaking Africa to have one on the scale of 1:50,000,” Bah adds, proudly. For more than two years, two aircraft crisscrossed the skies to take high-resolution aerial photographs. With these, some 30 Beninese cartographers used digital technology to map every waterway, road and building.


But that was just the first step. Once an area was digitalised, teams on the ground had to trek through thousands of towns and villages to check on names, boundaries and the state of roads.


“We had the old maps,” said Cyril Romieu, of Paris-based IGN FI, a geographic information company awarded the tender in 2014 to carry out the mapping. “But names change when they’re not written down. So we asked local elected representatives and the population.


“As for boundaries — between the villages — we drew those on the basis of what people told us,” he said. The project arose from work to safeguard trees around streams in Benin where deforestation can lead to flooding, pollution and greater poverty for local communities, according to the United Nations. The study was subsequently extended to the whole country at a cost of $9.3 million, financed by the European Union and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). A comparison with French colonial maps of the 1950s shows the extent to which urbanisation has taken hold in Benin, a nation of about 11 million. — AFP


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