Improving Infrastructure Monitoring to Support Sustainable Development with FieldSight by UNOPS: Goals 1,4,5,6,7,8,9,11,12,13,15,16,17

Infrastructure is a key enabling factor for each of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals. Functioning water, energy, and transportation networks, quality buildings, and widespread internet and communications technology all facilitate and enhance achievements in health, education, social development, economic growth, and more (Infrastructure: Underpinning Social Development, UNOPS). Low quality or poorly built infrastructure has significant long-term impacts on finances, growth, and health and safety. Poor quality infrastructure delivers lower quality and levels of services, thereby weakening the ability of infrastructure to contribute to social and economic development. In Latin America, transportation costs for goods are as much as three times higher than in OECD countries due to poor local transport infrastructure. Similarly, low quality infrastructure requires much greater costs in operation and maintenance, leading to costs that can be equal to or greater than properly-built infrastructure. Low quality infrastructure has been estimated to account for as much 40% of the difference between high and low growth rate countries. <br />
Low quality infrastructure can also introduce significant health and safety issues. Network failures and infrastructure collapses can lead to widespread destruction and death. In Nepal, more than 7,000 schools and 800,000 houses collapsed after the 2015 Gorkha earthquakes. Post-disaster analyses revealed key weaknesses in oversight and construction that led to the lack of inclusion of seismic resistance, even where designs and local buildings called for it. In Haiti, the poor quality of the building stock is widely credited for the severity of destruction and massive death toll following the 2010 earthquake. While as many as 300,000 people perished in Haiti, an earthquake 500 times the magnitude hit Chile just six weeks later, but only 500 people lost their lives. <br />
FieldSight enables monitoring and quality assurance for infrastructure and public sector projects. Designed to tackle many of the specific issues that arise when implementing infrastructure projects, FieldSight aims to improve the quality and integrity of infrastructure worldwide, including those faced by communities in Nepal and Haiti. FieldSight consists of both mobile and web apps. The mobile app is designed to support and enhance the work of engineers, site supervisors, and others working in the field, who use the mobile app to record information about the status and progress of infrastructure, access key information about project and quality standards, and communicate with project managers. The web app allows technical and management staff to review collected data, communicate with field staff, and map, explore, and analyze data at site, regional, project, and organizational levels. FieldSight has been used in 14 countries and has so far helped collect data on more than 60,000 unique sites.