Capitan Taki

Remote Sensing to monitor water quality in Lake Tanganyika and Lake Kivu.

Water Management in East African lakes

With more than 18% of the world's available freshwater, the Tanganyika and Kivu Lake Basins are of global importance and sources of socio-economic well-being, serving over 12 million people. Nonetheless, the lakes are experiencing water quality deterioration due to climate change, poor land-use, and urbanisation, while overfishing and the impact of invasive plant species are exerting high pressure on the aquatic food systems. Furthermore, the effect of climate change is exacerbated by the unique and complex morphologies of the lakes, and the complex fluctuations of winds, the influence of which on the lakes is not yet fully known.

The Capitan Taki project aims for both lakes to

create a community,
collect and create available information, studies and data on environmental and climate issues,
organize capacity building on climate adaptive measures,
share the collected (incl. satellite-based) information, knowledge and materials on a demo platform, as a first stage for further implementation of environmental monitoring systems,
prepare a roadmap based on building blocks for the environmental monitoring system.

Partners & funding

Capitan Taki is a quadruple helix capacity building project (March 2024-September 2025) funded by the Flemish government through the Flanders International Climate Action Programme. It builds on and complements Enabel's (Belgian Development Agency) work of the Latawama project (2019-2023) funded by EU (European Union) DG INTPA on water quality management of lake Tanganyika.
It brings together key actors from the Lake Tanganyika Authority (LTA) and ABAKIR with experts from Flanders, Burundi, Rwanda, Zambia, Tanzania and Democratic Republic of Congo to take concrete steps towards climate-resilient transboundary water management via training, capacity building in the use of remote sensing tools and co-creation of roadmaps.

The Capitan Taki project is funded by the Flemish government.