EO Africa R&D Facility, ESA, the African Commission, GMES & Africa and CURAT announce:
The winners of the AfricaGIS 2021 Hackathon
on Food Security and Water Resources
During the AfricaGIS 2021 conference held in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire on 22nd – 26th November 2021, 40 participants from 21 countries all over Africa came together to solve challenges related to the Food Security and Water Resources. EO Africa R&D Facility, ESA, the African Commission, GMES & Africa and CURAT are pleased to announce the winners.
The event was kicked-off by a webinar held on the 17th November during which the teams were provided with information regarding the logistics, resources, and data available during the main event. The teams were created by the organizers in order to foster collaboration between participants from diverse backgrounds and based on their expertise and research interests and had several days to meet and discuss their projects on a dedicated chat platform before travelling to Abidjan. During the 3-day long main hackathon event, coders, scientists, students and entrepreneurs and space enthusiasts worked together to address challenges related to:
- Freshwater resources dynamics and water scarcity
- Coastal monitoring (water quality, coastal changes, ship detection)
- Impact of COVID-19 pandemic on agricultural production
- Conflict and food security – linking decrease in agricultural production to armed conflicts
using the EO Africa R&D Facility Innovation Lab, an interactive cloud processing platform that combines a wealth processing tools and data from Earth-observing satellites as well as complimentary datasets.
The winners of the Africa GIS 2021 Hackathon were chosen as their projects best demonstrated the use of open science principles, feasibility, and innovation in solving the above challenges.