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Several Africa-based projects will receive funding and support for cloud computing related to earth observation through an international partnership.
The programme is a collaboration between the Group on Earth Observations and Amazon Web Services. They announced 21 winning projects sharing US$1.5 million on 10 June.
Eight of the projects will be based in Africa: two in Nigeria, and one each in Egypt, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Rwanda and South Africa.
The projects gain access to GEO and Amazon’s Earth Observation Cloud Credits Programme, which helps developing countries analyse and process big datasets related to earth observation. They will also receive support and training from the organisers.
GEO said in a statement that cloud services will help developing countries overcome limited resources and poor connectivity to analyse large volumes of earth observation data.
The African projects are:
Cairo University (Egypt) – filtered alert hub toolset.
Ministry of Water, Irrigation and Energy (Ethiopia) – computing groundwater potential in arid and semi-arid parts of Ethiopia.
Ghana Space Science and Technology Institute – capacity building on monitoring of the Sustainable Development Goals.
Kenya Agricultural and Livestock Organisation – geodata for actionable farm intelligence.
University of Nigeria – operational monitoring system of ground deformities in Nigeria.
African Regional Institute for Geospatial Information Science and Technology (Nigeria) – spatial agricultural intelligence.
Kigali Collaborative Research Centre (Rwanda) – air quality forecasting for Africa.
South African National Space Agency – community version of the AfriCultuReS Decision Support System.