There often appears to be a political urgency which negates long term planning in developing countries. For example it is often stated that the GIS must be operational in say 2 years, but since this is virtually impossible, an appropriate strategy is not implemented thereby resulting in little progress 10 years later. Conversely, developed countries built their digital systems from well established manual map systems which have often evolved over decades and sometimes centuries. Developing countries are becoming a good area to evaluate the potential of new high spatial resolution imagery in medium to small scale map making. By using this source of information, developing countries have the potential of saving time and money as they avoid the intermediate step of establishing manual map