اللغة الإنجليزية 
البرتغالية 
الفرنسية 
العربية 
In November 2025, Digital Earth Africa and Africa Space Works signed a Letter of Collaboration to advance methane monitoring capabilities across the African continent, formalising a partnership focused on strengthening climate-focused Earth observation.
The agreement establishes a shared commitment to build one of the first open and representative methane detection datasets for Africa. The collaboration focuses on identifying oil and gas super-emitters using satellite data and developing reproducible, scalable AI-driven workflows tailored to African contexts.
Addressing a critical data gap
Methane is a potent greenhouse gas, yet monitoring across many African regions remains limited due to sparse ground-based measurements. Satellite Earth observation provides a cost-effective and scalable pathway to detect and track emissions at scale.
Through this collaboration, Africa Space Works leads the methane detection workflow. This includes selecting emission sites, processing data from Sentinel-2, Sentinel-5P and Landsat, generating methane proxies, annotating plume masks, and training AI models for detection, segmentation and quantification.
Digital Earth Africa provides access to analysis-ready satellite data via its data cube infrastructure, technical support for labelling and validation, and ensures that workflows and Jupyter notebooks are publicly accessible to promote transparency, reproducibility and capacity building.
The resulting dataset and methodology will be jointly published and presented at Deep Learning Indaba 2026, reinforcing African leadership in climate AI research.
Building on emerging African expertise
The collaboration comes at a time when African researchers are advancing methane monitoring using satellite data.
As recently featured in our Spotlight series, Assala Benmalek, a research engineer at Africa Space Works, has leveraged the DE Africa platform to detect methane super-emission events in Algeria, including in Hassi Messaoud and Hassi R’Mel.
Her work contributes to the development of one of the first methane detection datasets tailored to the African context. It highlights both the demand for open, well-curated African datasets and the growing technical capacity on the continent to apply AI to environmental challenges.
The DE Africa and Africa Space Works collaboration builds on this momentum, formalising efforts to create an open, standardised methane dataset that can support broader climate monitoring and innovation across Africa.