Lagos surveyors have turned their Mandatory Continuing Professional Development (MCPD) programme into a workforce upskilling project, training about 750 professionals on how geospatial intelligence can help address Lagos’ waste generation and storage challenges.
This was disclosed in a communiqué issued at the end of the 2026 MCPD programme of the Nigerian Institution of Surveyors (NIS), made available to The HR Anchor on Wednesday. The programme was held on October 21 and 22, 2026, at the institution’s secretariat in Alausa, Ikeja, with the theme “Application of Geospatial Intelligence in Solid Waste Generation, Storage and Management.”
Unlike the traditional lecture-only model, this year’s MCPD combined technical lectures with intensive capacity development.
According to the communiqué, participants had been engaging in a massive open online course (MOOC) over the previous seven days, using QGIS to assess and analyse dump-site locations, site suitability, air quality mapping and soil investigation.
The lecture, delivered by Surv. Dr. Godwin Omenka Ode of Bells University of Technology, Ota, covered ten modules, including waste generation profiling, landfill site suitability, collection route optimisation and remote sensing applications. Hands-on practical sessions using Lagos datasets were facilitated by Surv. Jamba-Oda Yinka Taofiq.
The upskilling, according to the branch, became necessary because geospatial expertise is underused. The communiqué noted that “Surveyors had the required skills and tools: [GNSS, drone mapping, GIS, remote sensing] to generate the evidence base model, but they rarely engaged in waste planning.”
To demonstrate their capacity, surveyors deployed GIS-based multi-criteria decision analysis to propose new landfill sites in Epe and Badagry and recommended practical, low-cost workforce solutions.
These included calls to “Engage Surveyors to carry out volumetric analysis of existing landfills. Use UAV and other data acquisition tools” and to “Establish a Waste Data Unit within LAWMA or the Ministry of the Environment, this will keep continuous, reliable waste information in the State.”
The branch stressed that future waste management jobs will require new competencies, noting that “Free data [Sentinel imagery, OpenStreetMap, WorldPop] and free software [QGIS] are sufficient as a prototype” for building talent.
The branch also called for the integration of the informal sector, noting that there are over 18,000 cart pushers and 5,000 waste pickers. It proposed bringing them into a mapped and regulated system to formalise jobs and create a more accountable workforce through a geospatial dashboard that tracks bin fill levels and private sector participation (PSP) vehicle performance.
