World Bank-financed projects need to undergo supervision to ensure funds are utilized for their intended purposes. Sometimes, however, projects are located in conflict-affected areas that make project supervision a challenge. World Bank project teams and implementing government agencies needed an innovative tool to address this problem.
Pointer, a web-based tool was developed to track projects’ physical progress remotely.
Pointer allows the government agency responsible for implementing the project to capture geo-tagged images of assets and facilities created under the project, which are then displayed on a Geographic Information System (GIS)-based platform. These images, captured through a smartphone, are automatically tagged with Global Position System (GPS) coordinates.
Pointer has proven to be especially useful in Pakistan. Praising the new technology, Osama Bin Saeed, Provincial IT Manager in Pakistan, says, "Once we accomplished the task of updating our data in Pointer, it became fairly easy to present our progress at different forums and also provided us with a means to identify the gaps we needed to cover. Personally I really like the way it integrates the data of our project with spatial information of our region."