Supporting Central and Western African countries in the use of satellite imagery for the design, implementation and monitoring of public policies for sustainable land development, from 2010 to 2020

Abstract

Despite the increasing openness and democratisation of satellite data and associated processing tools, the use of these data and the information derived from them remains relatively limited in the Southern countries. For several years now, initiatives have been launched to improve access and use by local actors. This paper presents the results of 3 successive projects funded by the French Development Agency in Central and West Africa between 2010 and 2020. These projects, led by IGN FI and the French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development (IRD), have provided some answers to the main challenges identified by local partners such as: access to data, improving data processing skills, raising awareness among decision-makers and land managers of the information and services that can be derived from it, reference land cover maps production by local teams, and the development and structuring of user networks. This paper presents the actions and results in three areas of intervention, namely (i) the free provision of recent high-resolution data, (ii) the local production of forest cover and land use change maps and (iii) the promotion of the use of images through training and scientific activities. The results of several projects supported within the framework of these actions are published in this special Africa issue.