Community building is a central aspect of the EO AFRICA Initiative. It will allow our stakeholders to follow-up on events and calls, participate in the Space Academy and/or make use of the Innovation Lab. Only by engaging with the community the EO AFRICA Initiative will achieve its overarching goal: fostering innovation processes for a continuous development of EO capabilities in Africa.
This activity started with mapping the User community and its scientific needs and gaps making use of our Consortium’s extensive African network both in the EO and the agricultural&water sectors.
Results of the User Need survey
Capacity Needs Assessment of the African EO Community
The objective of the needs assessment was to get an insight into the EO-related background and training needs of the African EO community, and to understand what research challenges they identified.
The assessment was based on a survey that contained questions related to: General EO knowledge, Cloud computing for EO, Digital tools for EO R&D (e.g. Jupyter Notebooks), EO challenges for agriculture (food security) and water resources management, with focus on water scarcity (see Appendix 1 for the questions).
Some results related to the capacity building aspects of the survey are presented below:
The results were summarised in baseline reports and discussed with ESA and the Advisory Board of the project, and disseminated through this portal and our Twitter account.
There will be a workshop at the end of Phase 1, which will also provide consultation opportunities between the Facility and its stakeholders, and the members of the EO AFRICA R&D Advisory Board.
Scientific side events on conferences, special unconventional events (contests, hackathons, etc.) are inherent parts of this task. Such events will be eventually published in the calendar of the Facility.