Catalyzing Earth Observations for Sustainable Development in Africa
By Alyson Marks
The growth of Earth Observation data (EO) has skyrocketed over the past few years with technological advancements and a surge in new technologies, including Geographic Information Systems (GIS), image processing, satellite imagery, and PNT services. With these technologies, users can add more granularity, temporal, and localized information to their data. And the rise in EO shows no signs of slowing down anytime soon.
According to a recent analysis by Morgan Stanley, space-borne EO’s value is expected to exceed $25 billion USD by 2040. Additionally, a recent assessment highlights that existing EO systems could generate data for 33 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) indicators across 14 goals. Consequently, governments are increasingly using this data for evidence-based decision-making on sustainable development challenges, with recent examples abound from Canada and Colombia to Vietnam. Yet, countries in the Global South, particularly in Africa, continue to face challenges with harnessing the breadth and complexity of EO data for decision-making on sustainable development issues.
TReNDS’ latest research paper explores the bottlenecks to use and the types of partnerships that may prove beneficial to overcoming these challenges, drawing from interviews with West African institutions and the grey literature. Findings reveal the following key insights:
Weaknesses in awareness and trust on using EO are common amongst policymakers in West Africa, and analytical partners could do better to convey its value for evidence-based decision-making.
Historically, progress has been slow to get policymakers to trust new forms of data, given their lack of long-standing use to support decision-making. Our interviewees shared that trust issues are partly due to EO’s departure from tradition, including the use of imagery rather than land surveys and the use of EO-derived proxies instead of population surveys, as well as due to poor communication from partners on uncertainty, precision, and standard errors in the data that end-users are unlikely to understand the full context in which the information is used. Thus, it is critical that analytical partners are cognizant of both the local decision-context (including political motivations), as well as have the ability to effectively describe these issues to end-users.
Physical and digital infrastructure restraints remain obstacles to EO growth.
The most frequently mentioned challenge for EO use across Africa continues to be physical and digital constraints. Internet connectivity has not yet caught up in terms of speed, cost, and reliability. For instance, accessing high-bandwidth internet and the dependency on low-speed connections (often over mobile phone hotspots), mean that data download times are extensive, and there are frequent electrical power outages due to unreliable power grids. Additionally, Internet subscription prices in Africa are substantially more expensive than throughout the rest of the world.
To help address some of these issues, many African nations would benefit from increasing their spatial data infrastructure (SDI). And while some advancements have been made in West Africa, including in Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal, and Burkina Faso, in order for these architectures and standards to be broadly applied, national resources are required along with international expertise.
Developing and retaining locally-skilled individuals continues to prove challenging, but in recent years this is gradually improving.
Human resource issues remain acute across many African institutions, particularly with regard to recruiting staff with the requisite skills and retaining talent. National institutions are often unable to compete with international salary levels, and the Global South, particularly Africa, tends to be isolated from emerging science in the field of EO.
Fortunately, in recent years, this has begun to gradually improve. Space agencies, such as Copernicus and NASA ARSET, have programs targeted on applications in the Global South and are actively used by researchers and analysts throughout Africa. Locally, the West and Central African Research and Education Network (WACREN) offers a platform through which government and non-government actors can partner with academia to develop, promote, and sustain human resource capacity in the region. Additionally, international programs, including the Food and Agriculture Organization, Grid3, and the Group on Earth Observations, offer free trainings and capacity-building tools on the use of EO, such as the Earth Observations Toolkit for Sustainable Cities and Human Settlements. Nevertheless, EO partners must establish an effective means of making potential beneficiaries aware of these opportunities.
Commercial licensing, government data fees, and national security policies present barriers, but regional economic communities are helping to expand use.
Several policy-related issues also preclude the advancement of EO in Africa. These include fees for data access to commercial imagery and government statistical data, as well as national security policies, which prevent the exchange of geospatial data, particularly high-resolution imagery and the use of unmanned aerial vehicles, such as drones. This issue is especially pertinent in West and East Africa, where large swaths of territory are often insecure and inaccessible.
In both the cases of commercial licensing fees and government fees for statistical data access, an agreed means of either providing funding or reducing access costs to the levels appropriate for use by regional institutions should be sought. Regional economic communities can also offer important venues for policy dialogue on the application of EO. For instance, the African Union (AU) has been instrumental in helping to expand the use of EO on the continent, establishing an Africa-wide space policy to encourage greater regional integration in addressing user needs, accessing space services, developing a regional market, adopting good governance and management, and promoting intra-Africa and other international cooperation. This policy has supported the development of the Africa Resource Management Constellation and is coordinated by the South Africa National Space Agency in collaboration with the Algeria, Kenya, and Nigeria space agencies.
A broad base of partners is essential for leveraging EO for sustainable development.
For leveraging EO data for decision-making, the partnership landscape is equally diverse and complex as for any big data source, as EO data has many attributes that require sophisticated techniques and technologies to enable the capture, storage, distribution, and analysis. For instance, government entities using EO data need to establish relationships beyond initial data providers and may need to partner with a technical service and technology providers to gain access to capabilities if they are not available in-house. Additionally, knowledge brokers/conveners can be helpful to build trust among the various partners, and additional funding is often needed via external donors or an executive sponsor to help champion internal funding allocations. Lastly, a legal or data privacy partner is often overlooked, but can be especially helpful in navigating the regulatory and legal landscape for harnessing EO data.
It is clear that a robust partnership framework that encourages producing fit-for-purpose data is needed to fully mobilize EO for sustainable development in Africa. TReNDS’ earlier work on the effective use of big data for national SDG monitoring provided a partnership typology to assist national governments in selecting the right type of partner to overcome critical challenges, and we’ve used a similar model to guide countries on building partnerships to support the use of EO. However, as indicated in the paper, extensions to the model will be important for future work on this issue. And as the world continues to face even more acute and complex sustainable development challenges, the ability to harness innovative data sources, particularly EO, across countries everywhere will become even more paramount.