ESA EO Africa Facility Announces 10 New African-European Earth Observation Research Projects

The ESA EO Africa Research and Development Facility has announced 10 new research projects to be conducted by African-European tandems. These projects, selected from the 3rd call for proposals, will run for 15 months starting from December 2024 The selected research projects cover various topics which leverage Earth Observation data sources related to atmospheric pollution , droughts, water level monitoring, to crops, biomass and carbon stocks.

Following the successful first two rounds of calls for research proposals, the EO AFRICA R&D Facility, in coordination with the European Space Agency (ESA) and the African Union Commission (AUC), launched in July 2024 a 3rd call for proposals. The aim of this call is to extend the support to African-European collaborative research efforts in the domain of EO applications. Similar to the previous calls, applicants were invited to submit their research ideas to create EO-based algorithms and workflows by leveraging cutting-edge cloud-based data access and computing infrastructure to tackle water and food security challenges in Africa.

This grant provides the selected proposals with 30,000 EUR for research activities during a period of 15 months. In addition, awarded projects will get free access to cloud-based Virtual Research Environments through the Innovation Lab of the Facility, dedicated user and technical support, access to EO AFRICA Space Academy events, and integration into the EO AFRICA Network for international scientific collaboration.

The submitted proposals were evaluated by the Selection Committee in collaboration with ESA and AUC, resulting in 10 research tandem projects (listed below). The last arrangements with the associated institutes are expected to be finalized soon.