Facilitating African-European R&D Partnership in Earth Observation Through Collaborative Research: EO AFRICA R&D Research Calls

The EO AFRICA R&D Facility is the flagship of the EO AFRICA initiative that aims to facilitate the sustainable adoption of EO and related space technology in Africa through an African-European R&D partnership. For this purpose, the Facility supports capacity development for research by organizing tailor-made domain-specific training courses and webinars, and capacity development through research by enabling research projects co-developed and run by African and European research tandems. During its first phase in 2020-2023, the Facility launched two research project calls to support African-European collaborative efforts in developing innovative, open source EO algorithms and applications adapted to African solutions to African challenges by using cutting-edge cloud-based data access and computing infrastructure. The calls aimed at addressing emerging research topics in food security and water scarcity, making full use of the digital transformation in Africa and the observation capabilities of the ESA and Third Party EO missions. More than 100 project proposals were submitted by African and European co-investigators affiliated with public and private research institutions in 29 African and 17 European countries and covering a wide range of topics such as crop monitoring, yield forecasting, climate change, flood mapping, livestock mapping, soil monitoring, lake monitoring, biodiversity, etc. Following an exhaustive peer-review and evaluation process considering 33 criteria grouped under 6 categories, including qualifications of the project team, scientific quality of the proposed work, innovation and impact potential, use of EO data, use of cloud-based ICT infrastructure, and budget, the Facility provided financial support and ICT infrastructure to 30 research projects. Each project developed an innovative algorithm or research workflow delivered as open-source research code, preferably as interactive notebooks, together with open-access research data. The results of the research projects are also published as open-access scientific publications. In this talk, first, the details of the research calls are described starting for the preparation of the call, up to the closure of the research projects, with a special emphasis on the evaluation process. Then, an overview of the submitted proposals are provided including research questions, EO data and analysis methods, work and budget distribution, geographical distribution, and gender balance. The results of the funded projects are summarized and finally, the lessons learned from the research calls are discussed in detail, including challenges in using cloud computing infrastructure, performing collaborative research as tandems, budget utilization, and Open Science practices.