اللغة الإنجليزية 
البرتغالية 
الفرنسية 
العربية 
In Rwanda, where smallholder farmers depend on reliable rains and healthy soils to feed their families, the gap between satellite technology and the people who need it most has long been wide. A new collaboration between Digital Earth Africa and UGAMA (Umuryango wo Gushyigikira AMAkoperative) is working to close it.
Who is UGAMA?
Based in Muhanga, Rwanda, UGAMA is a national non-governmental organisation with a clear mission to transform communities through cooperatives and grassroots development. With deep roots in Rwanda’s agricultural landscape, UGAMA works alongside farmers, community-based organisations, government agencies, and private institutions by building capacity, extending services, and advocating for sustainable land and water management practices.
It is this on-the-ground reach, the trust built with cooperatives, the relationships with local government that makes UGAMA a powerful partner for translating satellite data into practical, human impact.
Satellite data, real-world decisions
Formalised in September 2025, the Letter of Collaboration between DE Africa and UGAMA creates a framework for joint work across agriculture, water resources, and flood and drought risk management. Under the agreement, DE Africa will provide free access to analysis-ready earth observation data, operational services, and capacity building support. UGAMA will apply that data to real challenges in Rwanda by monitoring crops, tracking environmental change, informing flood and drought adaptation strategies, and engaging communities in evidence-based decision-making.
For many of the communities UGAMA serves, access to reliable, timely environmental data has historically been out of reach. DE Africa’s open-access satellite datasets covering everything from vegetation health to surface water extent change that equation. They give local organisations like UGAMA the same view of their landscape that planners and policymakers in far larger institutions have long taken for granted.
Building capacity and partnerships
A central thread running through the collaboration is capacity development. DE Africa will facilitate online training workshops and face-to-face events to build skills in satellite data use across UGAMA’s networks including staff from government, academic, NGO, and private sector institutions in Rwanda. UGAMA, in turn, will leverage its own networks to identify development projects ready to integrate satellite data, and will promote DE Africa resources through use case development and knowledge sharing.
The technical expertise from DE Africa, community reach and the local knowledge from UGAMA is the model that makes African earth observation meaningful. Data is only as useful as the people equipped to use it, and the systems in place to act on it.
Rwanda’s terrain is both productive and vulnerable. Hilly, densely farmed, and increasingly affected by shifting rainfall patterns and rapid economic growth, the country faces real pressure on its land and water systems. Satellite data offers a way to monitor these pressures at scale, detecting drought stress before it becomes crop failure, tracking water levels before they become flood risk, identifying land degradation before it becomes permanent loss.
The DE Africa–UGAMA collaboration is designed with exactly this context in mind. By combining UGAMA’s extensive field experience with DE Africa’s continental-scale data infrastructure, the partnership aims to strengthen Rwanda’s capacity to monitor, adapt, and act, from the cooperative level up.