How Can Gis and Rs Support the Decision Making for Rural Development Programs in Egypt

While all huge sounds laudable to spread the using of geographic information systems GIS and remote sensing RS in many fields of development practices, there still are some issues need to be teased out. This paper endeavors to cast some light on a critical question has arisen in the context of spatial decision analysis: that is how and to which extent can GIS and RS techniques provide the support required at each of the three stages of decisionmaking for rural development in Egypt. To accomplish this task, the concept of decision-making has been investigated through five main stages represent the components of integrated rural development program currently implemented in Egypt. This paper reports that GIS and RS may play a vital role at the stages of exploration and analysis of local resources, planning, and evaluation. These three stages reflect intelligence and choice phase in the context of decision-making. Meanwhile, the study does also argue that the exploiting of GIS and RS technology is extremely limited in the stage of stimulating the society as well as stage of implementation of developmental plan, which reflect the design stage of decision-making model. However, a specific influence of RS appears explicit in recognition of natural resources, which can be extremely utilized for rural development programs in Egypt instead of following traditional means currently used to report such resources. In addition, RS introduces a clear vision of changes of land-use/cover occurred during the period 1986-2000. Moreover, a lot of thematic maps can be introduced by GIS providing a comprehensive picture of the situation in each village of Assiut province, thereby facilitating the setting of priorities for rationalization of the use of resources and effective rural development planning especially at long run.