Contribution of a GIS to the management of rice project in the north-west of Côte d'Ivoire: the case of Denguele region

Rice is a strategic axis of socio-economic development of the region of Denguele because of the population increase. In spite of the essential role which plays the rice in the consumption of the population in developing countries, its production remains always insufficient. National policy of Côte d'Ivoire regarding rice knew a development at the beginning of 1970s in this north region of the country. This is not the case now because of lack of follow-up of many projects and malfunction of structures management. So today, the evaluation of the projects executed within the framework of a rice crop campaign requires the manipulation of a big quantity of heterogeneous data. The design of an appropriate management tool is necessary to organize and communicate information to facilitate decision making. The adopted approach is the one of a geodatabase which consists of the elaboration and the implementation of the data in a relational database management system. The data were modeled according to the Entity-Relationship formalism based on MERISE method which is characterized by three levels: conceptual, logical and physical. The result of this work indicates an unequal distribution of rice projects in this region. They are all concentrated around the town of Odienne which occupies about 41% of the cultivated area at the expense of other localities. This GIS highlights the benefits of implementing a geographic database for the management of a rice project.