Craig Schwabe is the director of the GIS division of AfricaScope. He is the former director of the GIS Centre (GIS) of the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) in South Africa. At the HSRC he was also the programme director for the Affiliated Network for Social Accountability in Africa (ANSA-Africa) that was sponsored by the World Bank. He has a BSc degree from the University of KwaZulu-Natal and a diploma in business management.
As director of the GIS division, he focuses on the development of spatial information and its effective application in decision making within the public and private sectors. In this regard he has over many years been the forerunner in the development of socio-economic and business related datasets. He was one of the first people to develop a nationwide census database in GIS. He is also the author of the crime, telephone exchange, development funding, poverty and food insecurity datasets. In the private sector he pioneered the integration of Living Standard Measures (LSM), Financial Summary Measures (FSM) and lifestyle segmentations into GIS.
Craig has managed many research and GIS projects. Recent GIS-related projects in which he has been involved include conducting a population and use of land audit for the Royal Bafokeng Nation, developing a branch location strategy for SA MultiLoan and assisting the Department of Public Service and Administration in developing a guideline for optimizing the location of government services in South Africa. He has also overseen a project to capture the 2001 census data for Tanzania into GIS. He has also developed Food Insecurity and Vulnerability Information Management System (FIVIMS) for the Department of Agriculture and the World Food Programme (WFP), conducted Citizen Report Card Surveys for the World Bank in South Africa, Ghana and Mozambique. Craig also participated in the cataloguing of fundamental geospatial datasets for Africa that was conducted under the auspices of the Mapping Africa for Africa (MAFA) initiative of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA).
The development of demographic estimates at a localized level for 2004-2010, poverty indicators and economic indicators (e.g. GGP) are some of the more recent databases that he has assisted in developing. He has worked on many projects in the private sector including profiles for retail and financial outlets. Craig specializes in the use of GIS to spatially display and analyse information for use in decision-making including information gathered from field surveys. To accomplish this, he uses a variety of techniques including small area estimation techniques and accessibility modelling.
He has been the African correspondent for the Geoconnexion International Magazine. Craig has published many scientific papers, presented at GIS conferences and published several books on GIS and related