Rapid Assessment of Squatting Report (NOTE: LARGE FILE)

The primary data collected was not geo-referenced. Only textual data was collected; therefore
detailed geospatial analysis could not be carried out.
The squatter settlement base map used in the project was provided by the Mona Geo-Informatics
Institute. It contained approximately five hundred and eighty-five (585) settlements. Only point
data was available and this limited the amount of geospatial analysis being conducted.
Proper GIS analysis could not be conducted.
The main hindrance to the GIS analysis on the environmental and land use component is that
settlements are represented as points, and as such the aerial extent of the settlements could not be
determined. It was therefore not possible to observe how squatter settlements are aligned to
natural resources or how they are positioned to existing planned settlements.
Data accuracy was also a limitation as some of the datasets were outdated and therefore did not
reflect current conditions.
Data standards need to be set to ensure quality of the data. The names of the settlements did not
correspond in the different datasets which increased the difficulty of analyzing the data using
GIS. This needs to be done properly
Due to the fact that all the settlements mapped were not surveyed, the results are presented as an
extrapolation. The settlements that were surveyed and mapped are used to represent the total
squatter settlements in a particular parish. The data that is provided therefore is but a sample of
the actual population of squatter settlements.
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