The AfriGEO Symposium 2024

Theme: Earth Intelligence for Africa

Date: 12th–15th August 2024

Venue: RCMRD, Nairobi - Kenya

Overview

AfriGEO is an initiative of the African Community in GEO aimed at providing a coordination framework and platform for Africa’s participation in GEO. It aims to be a Pan African initiative to raise awareness and develop capacity in EO for governments, research organizations, academia, and the commercial sector; to provide a framework for strengthening partnerships and collaborations within Africa; to be a gateway into Africa for international partners, and to be a support mechanism for the implementation of GEO objectives and programmes in Africa in line with the GEO Post 2025 Strategy.

The GEO Post 2025 Strategy “Earth Intelligence for All'' seeks to inspire and emphasize the need for GEO to provide targeted and actionable insights based on Earth Observation data for better decision making for a sustainable world. The strategy reflects our commitment to act on the urgent need to restore the equilibrium between the human race and planetary health.

Concept

On January 31st, 2016, the African Union Head of states and Governments adopted the African Union Space Policy. The policy, as stated in the Africa Agenda 2063, reflects the African desire for shared prosperity, unity and integration. Key to providing support to the agenda is the formulation of a science, technology, and innovation strategy, which is an important intervention for using science and technology in responding to key priorities of the continent.

The symposium objectives link to and are adopted from the African Union Space Policy. The objectives are:

  • Addressing user needs (“To harness the potential benefits of space science and technology in addressing Africa’s socio-economic opportunities and challenges.”)
  • Addressing space services (“To strengthen space mission technology on the continent in order to ensure optimal access to space-derived data, information services and products.”)
  • Developing the regional Market (“To develop a sustainable and vibrant indigenous space industry that responds to the needs of the African continent.”)
  • Coordinating the African Space (“To maximize the benefit of, current and planned, space activities, and avoid or minimize the du-plication of resources and efforts.”)
  • Promoting intra-Africa & other international cooperation (“To promote the African-led space agenda through mutually beneficial partnerships.”)
  • Adopting good governance and management (“To adopt good corporate governance and best practices for the coordinated management of continental space activities.”)

A prerequisite to achieving all the above objectives is integration, co-design, user engagement, partnership and capacity development both at institutional, organization and individual levels (amalgamating, systems, people, policies, and parts together to improve productivity and quality of operations.). A backbone to this approach already provided for in the Africa Space Policy which aims to create a well-coordinated and integrated African Outer space Programme that is responsive to the aforementioned spheres (technological, social, political, economic, legal and environmental).

The AfriGEO Symposia

The AfriGEO symposia have been held annually since 2016. They are an opportunity for the AfriGEO Community to connect, engage and build meaningful collaboration that support and address varied developmental challenges on the continent using earth observation.

In the face of tremendous urbanization challenges, increased weather/climate unpredictability, increased population growth, frequent disasters, increased water scarcity, increased economic inflation, increased level of crime in cities and rural areas, scarce resources and poor management of resource vis-a-vis improved information access, rich indigenous knowledge, advancement in technology, targeted policies, open access to analytical tools, improved and more accurate early warning systems, advancements in internet of things, robust spatial plans, improved user participation, well drafted national, regional, continental and worldwide agenda, well designed protocols and symposium recommendations on environmental protection, well thought of sustainable development goals among others all taking place and having impacts on the various systems.

The key questions remain “How do we harness the power of earth intelligence to support decisions in various sectors? How do we integrate, co-design, systems, science, professions, people, policies to improve productivity and quality of operations. Various strides have been made in the recent past in the technological, social, political, economic, legal and environmental spheres that are geared towards improving the quality of life within the African Continent and beyond.

The AfriGEO symposium 2024 therefore aims at providing a platform to begin this engagement and walk by bringing together experts from the aforementioned spheres to discuss, unlock and activate the aspect of Integration, Co-design, user engagement, partnership and capacity development in Africa.

The AfriGEO Symposium will focus on AfriGEO’s priority topics:

  • Agriculture, Food Security, Soil Moisture and Agricultural Outreach Support
  • Biodiversity, Land degradation and Sustainable Forest Management
  • Land Cover for Africa, Land administration, Sustainable Urban Development
  • Blue economy and Water Resource Management
  • Climate Services and Adaptation.
  • Health, air quality and Disaster Management.
  • Innovation, Data and Infrastructure