Mapping the Future: Digital Earth Africa and Esri’s Continental Partnership

Across Africa, the use of Earth observation data is growing rapidly as governments, researchers, and development organisations increasingly rely on satellite-derived insights to inform environmental management and planning. Through a growing collaboration between Digital Earth Africa (DE Africa) and Esri, these insights are becoming easier to access, analyse and apply using widely adopted geospatial tools. Together, this enables a system of systems approach, where data from multiple sources can be integrated and analysed holistically, providing richer context and supporting better, evidence-based decision making.

Making Earth Observation Work Within Familiar Tools

For Earth observation data to be useful, it needs to meet users where they already work and directly support the decisions they need to make. That principle has guided much of the technical collaboration between DE Africa and Esri.

Digital Earth Africa provides open access to satellite data and derived products that help monitor environmental change across the continent. Working together with Esri, these services are increasingly being integrated into the ArcGIS systems, such as the Africa GeoPortal and ArcGIS Living Atlas, enabling users to visualise and analyse DE Africa datasets within familiar geospatial workflows, without needing to navigate separate platforms or reformat data. These analysis-ready datasets can be combined with local geospatial information and shared through simple, purpose-built GIS applications tailored to different decision-making audiences. This delivers a scalable and sustainable approach for turning data into actionable insight across the entire user community, empowering everyone from data scientists to operational decision makers at all levels.

The Coastlines and Waterbodies services have received particular attention, with ongoing work to keep them current and to validate their accuracy across diverse geographic contexts. Behind the scenes, the two teams have refined visualisation workflows and strengthened quality assurance processes, building the kind of reliability required of operational services that form part of a wider services based geospatial infrastructure, one that supports sustained use, integration and reuse across a growing community of users and applications.

Supporting Country-Level Applications

Beyond platforms and training, the collaboration is also enabling connections with thousands of user organisations and contributing to practical applications at country level.

Coastal monitoring case studies in Ghana, Egypt, and Mozambique illustrate how DE Africa datasets can support real management decisions rather than simply demonstrating technical capability. Engagement with universities and national institutions is generating applied use cases, helping decision-makers see what Earth observation data can do for their specific contexts.

This country-level focus keeps the collaboration accountable to the people it aims to serve, and it generates the kind of concrete evidence that encourages wider adoption over time.

Building Skills Through Practical Learning

Access to data means little without the skills to use it well. This has been a consistent theme in the partnership’s approach to capacity building.

To support this, Digital Earth Africa and Esri have collaborated on a series of Learn ArcGIS tutorials around DE Africa datasets. Rather than abstract instruction, these modules take users through practical workflows such as exploring satellite imagery, conducting change detection analyses, and interpreting results in an African geographic context.

Future modules under discussion will further expand this learning pathway, drawing on case studies related to coastal monitoring and inland water systems across the continent.

As these learning pathways expand, they have the potential to reach a wide community of practitioners, from students encountering Earth observation for the first time to experienced GIS professionals adding new tools to their workflows.

Expanding Knowledge Sharing Across the Continent

Regional forums and knowledge-sharing platforms have played an important role in connecting the partnership’s work with the practitioners who use Earth observation data in their daily work.

At the 9th AfriGEO Symposium held in Dakar, Senegal in October 2025, the two organisations contributed to discussions on coastal and marine monitoring. DE Africa presented its Coastlines service, while Esri demonstrated how the dataset can be visualised and explored through the ArcGIS Living Atlas. Pre-conference workshops and training sessions gave participants the opportunity to work directly with these tools and datasets.

The partnership has also maintained a presence at other regional and global platforms including the Esri Annual User Conference, Esri Eastern Africa User Conference, GEO Global Forum, and UN-GGIM Africa events, helping broaden awareness of Earth observation applications across multiple sectors.

To ensure wider access to this knowledge, the “Esri at DE Africa Live” sessions have delivered technical demonstrations of DE Africa tools hosted on the Africa GeoPortal in multiple languages, including English, French, and Arabic. By enabling practitioners to engage with these tools in the languages they work in, the sessions have attracted participants from across the continent and expanded the reach of satellite-derived environmental monitoring.

A Partnership Focused on Practical Impact

What began as an exploratory collaboration in 2023 has matured into a structured programme of joint work, sustained by regular technical exchanges and a shared commitment to practical outcomes.

Together, the partnership is helping expand access to satellite data, strengthen geospatial skills, and improve how environmental information is communicated and applied.

As the use of Earth observation continues to grow across Africa, this collaboration demonstrates how combining open data platforms with widely adopted geospatial tools can operationalise the GIS for Good vision and accelerate the transition from data availability to real-world impact.