Many of today’s challenges, including the fight against poverty require reliable, complete and up-to-date information to inform, plan, implement and adjust appropriate responses and policies. Geospatial data, whether acquired by space (satellites) or terrestrial technologies (drones or IoT data), represent an increasingly valuable source of information. Indeed, technological changes and the massive deployment of earth observation satellites generate a phenomenal amount of earth observation data. Ever more precise and less and less expensive (freely and openly accessible for data from the European Copernicus programme), geospatial data can be used in many sectors, namely maritime safety and security, agriculture and land use, urban planning, monitoring of vegetation and biodiversity, adaptation to change climate, geographic economy etc. Geospatial data represents a two-fold opportunity: Beyond enabling decision-makers to increase the effectiveness of their public policies, especially for marginalised territories and communities, data-based solutions may also be important levers to create value and advance socio-institutional development.

 The Multi-Donor Action “Data Governance in Africa” is a Team Europe Initiative (TEI) jointly financed by the European Union (EU) and five EU Member States (namely Belgium, Estonia, Finland, France and Germany), and implemented in collaboration with the African Union. The Action aims to promote a “Development-oriented and human-centric data economy and society in Africa supported, in line with the AU Data Policy Framework”.

 One of the specific objectives of the Action, Specific Objective 2, is to promote data use and cross-border data flows leveraged on to create value and inform regulations in selected sectors. In accordance with this specific objective, Expertise France (EF) will implement capacity-building activities aiming to increase the ability of regional and national institutions, CSOs and Private Sector entities to access, analyse, use and share data for value creation, by supporting access and use of geospatial data.

Today, for example, the European Copernicus Programme offers a wide range of continuously updated Earth observation (EO) data from the Copernicus Sentinel missions. Despite the data being openly and freely accessible, few institutions, CSOs and private sector entities access, use and share this data for value creation. Barriers include lacking awareness within organisations, limited technical capacities, lacking infrastructure, and few experimentation opportunities with potential use cases. In order to contribute to overcome these barriers, improve access and develop use cases in two countries, Kenya and Senegal, EF has begun with consulting national stakeholders to identify geospatial and space data access issues, actual use and potential scale up.