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 the development of a Food Insecurity and Vulnerability Information Management System (FIVIMS) for the Department of Agriculture and the World Food Programme (WFP), the conducting of Citizen Report Card Surveys in Tshwane metro and OR Tambo district municipality for the World Bank and the cataloguing of fundamental geospatial datasets for Africa that is being conducted under the auspices of the Mapping Africa for Africa (MAFA) initiative of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA). Recently he has also advised institutions like the South African Revenue Service (SARS) and the Department of Education in KwaZulu-Natal on the optimized location of their facilities. He has advised the UNECA, African Ministers Conference on the Environment (AMCEN) and Southern African Development Community (SADC) on GIS matters.

The development of demographic estimates at a localized level for 2004-2007, poverty indicators and economic indicators (e.g. GGP) are some of the more recent datasets that he has assisted in developing. He has worked on many projects in the private sector including profiles for retail and financial outlets. Craig specialises 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. Presently, he is pioneering the use of a technique that he calls ‘circle point thematics’ that is a qualitative method of interpreting the results from household surveys. He is also pioneering the use of Google Earth in representing spatial information and developing information products to use in disseminating spatial information to the general public.

He is presently 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 topics.