Environmental Observatories for the Sound Management of Chemicals in Africa (ChemObs)

Project description

The African Chemicals Observatory (“ChemObs”) project aims at developing an integrated guidance to build capacity necessary to set up an integrated health and environment observatory surveillance and information management system. It aims at enabling African and Asian countries to establish evidence-based policies and make sustainable decisions on sound management of chemicals and related disease burdens. More specifically, it addresses the necessary improvements to be made in the fields of awareness, knowledge, information management and communication on chemicals to support and provide an enabling framework for measures and actions to be taken. To reach these objectives, this project carries out in-depth situation analysis on the status of the implementation of the Multilateral Environment Agreements (MEAs) and voluntary instruments to identify bottlenecks and challenges hampering their proper implementation. To help countries promoting evidence-based policy making, the project aims to develop and test an integrated health and environment observatory surveillance and information management system. This system should allow assessing and ranking potential regulatory and investment interventions.

The system is based on specific data workflows, from their collection in the field to their dissemination on a geoportal. In this project, GRID-Geneva’s role is to automate data workflows.