ABOUT SERVIR WEST AFRICA

SERVIR West Africa 2 Implementation

 SERVIR is a joint initiative of NASA and USAID. SERVIR works in partnership with leading organizations in various regions of the world to support them in providing decision makers with products and services (decision support tools, applications, models, training) to strengthen resilience and much more. To this end, SERVIR provides Earth observation data, drawn from satellite images, geographic information system (GIS) and predictive models, hence the slogan “connecting space to village”.

SERVIR is an international network:

• SERVIR-West Africa (SERVIR-WA), hosted by the International Crop Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT).
• SERVIR-East and Southern Africa, hosted by the Regional Centre for Mapping of Resources for Development (RCMRD).
• SERVIR-Himalaya, hosted by the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD).
• SERVIR-Mekong, hosted by the Asian Disaster Preparedness Centre (ADPC).
• SERVIR-Amazonia is hosted by the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT).

The SERVIR-WA activity is implemented by a consortium of seven regional institutions in Burkina Faso, Ghana, Mali, Niger, Nigeria and Senegal. It is structured around five themes: 

• Agriculture & Food Security,
• Water Security,
• Ecosystem & Carbon Management,
• Weather & Climate Resilience
• Financial Instruments

Improving Resilience through Science Partnerships

SERVIR WEST AFRICA 2 Theory of Change states that IF SERVIR WA:

• Ensures that services continue to be demand-driven and collaboratively developed using open source, open access and open science principles; AND
• Nurtures with robust technical backstopping the emergence of a dynamic EO collaborative scene, that is characterized by increased cooperation between public and private actors, and between established and aspiring entities; AND
• Builds the capacity of these budding partnerships towards the responsible exploitation, in context, of EO and other big data with artificial intelligence to concurrently serve non-profit and for-profit interests at local, national, and regional levels; AND
• Leverages these partnerships with an enabling environment and with service incubating mechanisms, including a financial services area to strengthen, using EO, the capacity of investors to quantify and control risk, enhance access to inputs and markets, and improve production potential, WHILE simultaneously
• Promoting gender and social inclusion and a culture of science for society, THEN

 SERVIR West Africa 2 will achieve the overall desired change to improve resilience, food and nutrition security, disaster risk reduction, and sustainable resource management at local, national, and regional scales through early action and increased use of EO information, Earth science, and technologies. In doing so, SERVIR West Africa 2 will positively affect lives and livelihoods in West Africa.

Towards a Regional Earth Observation Marketplace in West Africa

SERVIR West Africa 2 will ensure that by the end of Phase 2 there will be the architecture, the services and an enabling environment that results in:

• Promising services reaching full operational capability and lessons have been learnt from those that have not performed to expectations;
• Regional consortium partners being equipped for the design, development, procurement, production, validation, maintenance, and operation of geospatial services based on EO data; and
• A regional EO marketplace emerged, allowing for collaborative geospatial ventures and fair competition to improve the quality of services and the satisfaction of users across the public to private sector continuum.

These results will contribute towards the emergence of a self-sustaining regional EO services ecosystem (EO marketplace), achieving industrial-grade capacity for EO applications and public-private partnerships-led economies of scale across economic sectors.