TED’s Global Positioning System

The idea of the Global Positioning System for Technologies for Economic Development (TED) is to locate every Biogas/DEWATS site that is built by TED. Once the constructed sites are located with the GPS they can be relocated very easily. With this it is also guaranteed that anybody from TED’s construction team can easily and quickly locate and find any site, if there is a problem. With this possibility of quick reaction on a problem you can provide a better service for the customers.

TED’s GPS for taking the coordinates

In its portfolio TED works also in the area of building Biogas/DEWATS (Decentralized Wastewater Treatment System) composed of the digester, the Anaerobic Baffled Reactor (ABR) and the Plated Gravel Filter (PGF).

All in all TED has built up around 150 of these systems since 2002. These systems are spread all over Lesotho and even out of the country. From time to time it is needed that some of the systems get maintained or repaired. One can imagine that it is difficult to get to a site if you do not have an address or a defined location of this site. This is especially a problem in the rural areas of Lesotho where you do not have a street and house numbering system. The solution for this is using a Global Positioning System. With this small tool one can mark any position in the world and give this position defined coordinates. For example you can pick up the coordinates of the office of TED (coordinates: 29°18’33.6’’S, 27°27’55.1’’E) and of course you could also take the coordinates of any of TED’s systems.
These coordinates would not be very useful if one can not watch them on a map and get the navigation to those coordinates. But with free software that is available in the internet like “Google Maps” or “Google Earth” it is easy to find the exact position of every digital saved coordinate. Together with the saved coordinates it is also very useful to get a collection of data of every site, like the size, the owner’s phone number or just pictures of the site. For providing this information, every ready constructed site gets an entrance in the list of constructed sites. In this document one can find every site with its project number, some basic information and of course the satellite coordinates.

In addition to this digital saving of coordinates and data it is also useful to have a good overview of all the constructed sites. For that a map is needed. Every site gets a small pin and a number on this map. The map is divided in two parts. One is providing an overview of the whole country and one is just for the capital city Maseru, where more than half of all the systems are situated. The map itself can be used for promotional purpose. It can be shown to everybody very easily how many of the systems are constructed and what their exact position is. For this promotional usage the map needed to be easy transportable and nicely designed. The decision was to fix it on a wooden board that could be hung up and removed very easy.

All in all the now existing system of locating and treating the sites that TED has built in the last years and will build in the next years is a very professional solution. If this system is used with the needed effort it will save a lot of time.