GLOBAL MONITORING OF ENVIRONMENT AND SECURITY IN AFRICA (GMES & AFRICA) STAKEHOLDERS’ WORKSHOP DURING THE FIRST MESA FORUM IN NAIROBI, KENYA

The Global Monitoring of Environment and Security (GMES) & Africa stakeholders’ workshop will be convened during the first Monitoring for Environment and Security in Africa (MESA) Forum in Nairobi Kenya from 31st August – 4th September 2015. The workshop will deliberate among other issues on the services and applications that will be integrated in the implementation process. GMES & Africa draw critical lessons from the MESA project.
GMES & Africa is an Earth Observation (EO) capability that was launched in 2007 during the 2nd EU-Africa Summit responding to the Maputo Declaration of October 2006. It aims to provide sustainable, reliable, and timely space-derived environmental and security information to the public and policy-makers at national, regional and continental levels. Protection and utilization of our space is a key issue in the AU Agenda 2063, specifically Aspiration 7 and will contribute to the “The Africa We Want.”
GMES & Africa has been integrated into the First Action Plan of the EU-Africa Joint Strategic Partnership addressing the following areas: (i) Long term management of natural Resources; (ii) Water Resource management; (iii) Marine & coastal Management; (iv) Food Security and Rural Development; (v) Climate Variability and Change; (vi) Disaster risk reduction; (vii) Health; (viii) Conflict and Political Crisis and (ix) Infrastructure and Territorial Development. Cross cutting areas include policy and institutional framework; infrastructure framework; capacity building; financial issues; and monitoring and evaluation.
The 4th Africa-EU Summit held in Brussels in 2014 agreed to implement the initiative in phases to allow for robust realization of defined objectives. The first phase will focus on the first three thematic areas. To enhance cooperation between the EU and Africa on outer-space affairs and to ensure implementation of agreed initiatives such as GMES & Africa, a Space Troika composed of representatives of the relevant AUC departments and EC Directorates was set up in 2011 by the "College-to-College". The Troika equally serves as a political interface which steers space cooperation between EU and Africa. Such cooperation will in the long run enables Africa to exploit her outer-space resources and coordinate various fragmented space initiatives, so that space systematically contributes to the continent’s sustainable development efforts.
The 6th Space Troika held on 20th April 2015 adopted the GMES and Africa Road Map for implementation process of the first three thematic chapters that will commence in 2016 with a proposed budget of 28 million Euros to be funded from the Pan African Program.