ESA EO Africa National Incubator kicks off the ANIN project

Supporting drought monitoring and reporting activities in South Africa

We are proud to announce the official kick off of the ANIN project, one of the projects within the new ESA EO Africa Incubator programme. Within the ESA EO AFRICA initiative, the National Incubator’s programme will focus on increasing the awareness of EO data potential for added-value services in the field of drought monitoring and decision making. The programme is set up to support African governmental bodies, especially national agencies with a mandate to officially report on droughts.

The ANIN project will focus on South Africa and the Department of Water and Sanitation, which has the mandate towards drought reporting and monitoring. The project aims to provide EO-based services in the field of drought monitoring that can be independently managed and exploited by the African users with limited resources in the technological, technical and knowledge domain.

The scope of the project is not to research new indicators or complex services, but to provide a service that is easy to use and understand, and that can be easily operated independently by the users. In this context, VITO will be responsible for the implementation of the Drought Early Warning System on the openEO platform. OpenEO is an open application programming interface (API) that connects clients like Python to big EO cloud back-ends in a simple and unified way. 

ANIN has been officially kicked off on September 13, 2022 and will end in September 2024. The project is led by GMV (Spain) in cooperation with Hatfield (Canada), AgroApps (Greece) and VITO Remote Sensing (Belgium).