The Capacity Building Committee (CCC) of the Latin American and Caribbean Organization of Supreme Audit Institutions (OLACEFS), chaired by the TCU, received 37 nominations from the SAIs of Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua and Paraguay, from which 12 government employees of nine institutions were selected to participate in the OpenGeoHub, the Training of Specialists in Geocontrol. Practically all of the selected employees have experience with the application of technology to control, and a good number of them hold coordination and management positions. Approximately half work in the infrastructure area and the other half in the environmental area. 

Due to the high demand, the CCC decided to increase the original vacancies by 50%. Besides the technical aspects, the selection prioritized Supreme Audit Institutions (SAIs) with less structure and fewer resources. The participation of women was encouraged and they occupied 40% of the vacancies. 

The training will take place from October to December 2023. During the training, the students will develop projects on anthropic pressures (deforestation, degradation, fires, mining, etc.) and incidents on public lands. Assessment and prioritization techniques will be developed for each Conservation Unit and Indigenous Land in a given country. It is expected that these analyses will help in the knowledge of the control universe and the selection of control objects. 

About the OpenGeoHub initiative   

Geotechnologies are especially important for TCU units responsible for the inspection and monitoring of the following themes: environment, national security, infrastructure, land issues, management of territorial patrimony (SPU), national security, disaster risks and climate change. 

The OpenGeoHub initiative is a continuation of the effort that Olacefs has been undertaking since 2016 to develop geospatial skills in the employees of supreme audit institutions. Skills related to geotechnologies were considered the ones with the biggest gap by two OLACEFS Training Needs Assessments (2018 and 2021). The diagnosis on the use of geotechnologies with managers of the Federal Court of Accounts (TCU) carried out in 2019, technical documents, international standards, and academic articles on the subject also point to a high competence gap in the subject. 

In 2022, TCU servers who participated in the pilot version of OpenGeoHub developed courses dealing with environmental degradation, land use and occupation, illegal mining, vulnerability to extreme events, fires, and infrastructure. In 2023, some of these employees will act as internal multipliers. 

The opportunity cost resulting from not using geotechnologies in public control has increased as the variety, quantity and quality of geospatial information show an exponential increase, while its cost has dropped considerably. In many cases, this information and the technology to process it are free. Currently, the main obstacle to the wide use of geotechnologies in control is the technical capacity of the servers on the subject. 

The OpenGeoHub is the result of cooperation between the Latin American and Caribbean Organization of Supreme Audit Institutions (OLACEFS) and German Cooperation, through the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ).