Announcement

SERVIR connecting space to village in West Africa

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NASA, USAID and SERVIR West-Africa members celebrate the launch of the new hub.

On July 14, 2016, NASA and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) launched SERVIR-West Africa, a joint project to strengthen environmental monitoring in West Africa. One of four SERVIR hubs now operating in developing regions of the world, SERVIR-West Africa is based in Niamey, Niger, and joins a growing global community of scientists and decision-makers using publicly available data from space assets to tackle challenges facing the world today.

Ministers, NASA Administrator and USAID Mission Director at Launch
Prime Minister of Niger Brigi Rafini; M. Kassoum Denon, Coordinating Minister of CILSS  
(the Permanent Institute for Drought Control in the Sahel); NASA Administrator  
Charles Bolden; and Alex Deprez, USAID West Africa Mission Director  
at opening events for the launch of SERVIR-West Africa  

"NASA is deeply committed to Earth science and the value it provides people around the globe," said NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, who took part in the facility’s official opening. "Together with USAID, we are contributing to the effort to help bring space-based science down to Earth for real time, real world applications that are changing the lives of people where they live."

Together with leading regional organizations and local partners, SERVIR has developed 70 information products and tools and provided training to people in more than 41 countries. Teams of scientific experts at SERVIR-West Africa will draw on a continuous stream of space-based climate, weather, and other data from NASA’s constellation of Earth observing satellites, sharing timely information with policy makers, government agencies, and other stakeholders in Ghana, Burkina Faso, Senegal, and Niger to make more informed decisions in four areas: food security and agriculture; water and disasters; weather and climate; and land use, coastal zones, and forest management.

“There is an immediate demand to connect available science and technology to development solutions in West Africa,” said Alex Deprez, director of USAID’s West Africa regional office. “SERVIR-West Africa will engage scientists across the region to partner with each other to address the greatest challenges in the region. What we seek in the long term are African solutions to African problems.”

Ministers and USAID Mission Director speak at Launch
Prime Minister of Niger Brigi Rafini, CILSS Coordinating Minister M. Kassoum Denon,  
and USAID West Africa Mission Director Alex Deprez at opening  
of SERVIR-West Africa hub in Niamey, Niger  

Working hand-in-hand with NASA and USAID are the Agrometeorology, Hydrology and Meteorology Regional Center (AGRHYMET), a specialized agency of the Comité permanent Inter-Etats de Lutte contre la Sécheresse dans le Sahel (CILSS) (the Permanent Inter-State Committee against Drought in the Sahel), headquartered in Niamey; Tetra Tech Incorporated, headquartered in Pasadena, California; and a consortium of partners serving the West Africa region.

SERVIR’s global network of leading regional knowledge centers includes SERVIR-Eastern and Southern Africa, based at the Regional Center for Mapping of Resources for Development in Nairobi, Kenya, serving all of eastern and southern Africa; SERVIR-Himalaya, based at the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development in Kathmandu, Nepal, serving the Hindu-Kush-Himalaya region; SERVIR-Mekong, based at the Asian Disaster Preparedness Center in Bangkok, Thailand, serving the lower Mekong region of Southeast Asia; as well as other partners, dedicated to environmental management through the integration of Earth observations and geospatial technologies. The SERVIR Coordination Office is located at the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, USA.

Dan Irwin, the NASA research scientist who pioneered the SERVIR project, describes SERVIR's vision as "connecting space to village." Examples of SERVIR successes include development of satellite applications that have enabled the environment ministries in El Salvador and Nicaragua to issue real-time alerts pinpointing harmful algal blooms so fishermen can avoid them; Kenya’s Ministry of Natural Resources to better map and forecast areas of frost so they can protect crops; and forestry officials in Nepal and Bhutan to accurately locate and monitor forest fires. In Bangladesh, where climate change has altered rainfall patterns and disrupted predictable flood cycles, a new satellite-based flood forecasting system developed by SERVIR-Himalaya is helping to improve flood warning systems. SERVIR-West Africa will bring similar tools to bear on regional challenges.