icipe's mission is to help alleviate poverty, ensure food security and improve the overall health status of peoples of the tropics by developing and extending management tools and strategies for harmful and useful arthropods, while preserving the natural resource base through research and capacity building.
Geographic information systems (GIS) are of exceptional importance to support research in integrated pest management in Agriculture as well as in human and animal health related research. GIS helps us, for example, to understand linkages between the environment and the distribution of species or the vulnerability of animals and humans to vector-borne diseases. Especially the health sector is a growing field of interest where GIS in not only used to build linkages between environment and
GIS is used at icipe for applied insect science in many ways and is getting more and more important especially for research initiatives in the health sector. The icipe led CERNVec project is a good example showing how GIS can be used as an integrating tool for crosscutting health research on neglected vector borne diseases in Kenya. GIS is used in this project not only for research on disease transmitting insects, it is also applied to map Government data on disease incidence and distribution. Capacity building in GIS is one major component of the project to strengthen researcher as well as health workers in the use of GIS tools and techniques.