African Geodata Project

The Engineering and Physical Sciences Forum, in collaboration with the Bussiness, Governance and Economics Forum of the RAAI is seeking to develop self-sustaining economic solutions to the problem of food supply shortage and unemployment in some of the poorest regions of the African continent. Nangula Nghiyalwa of the RAAI has been researching Earth Sensing and Observation Technologies at the Friedrich Schiller University, Germany, which she believes can be of immense benefit to agriculture and Urban development on the continent.

For this reason, in 2021, the RAAI established a partnership with EagleEye GmbH, field experts in the utilization of Geodata for best practices in Urban and Regional Planning, Agriculture, and as well as Security, and Climate Change monitoring. RAAI also established a working partnership with Smart Planet Platform, a platform for integrating georeferenced data and algorithms into legacy applications in environmental and agricultural management.

This multi-stage project aims to implement advanced monitoring technologies in farming and agriculture in some of the most remote parts of Africa to boost investor confidence in the Agricultural sector. Actionable intelligence generated from complex advanced algorithms running on georeferenced data can be used to significantly improve agricultural investment outcomes, enhancing yields and directly tackling food shortages. Advanced stages of the project will include a complete technology transfer; training locals to independently run surveillance, monitoring, and analyses.

In the near future, the African Geodata project aims to expand to address issues bordering on Climate Change, Security, Natural resource protection and monitoring as well as Environmental planning and protection.

Please, Read the RAAI 2021 report on the use of satellite data in Agriculture.