The BRAGMA project, coordinated by IICT is a Coordination and Support Action to GMES and Africa, supported by the European Commission. Copernicus, formerly GMES (Global Monitoring for Environment and Security) is the European Programme for the establishment of a European capacity for Earth Observation: http://www.gmes.info/

This workshop will focus on consolidating the validated and endorsed final GMES and Africa Action Plan (GAAP) Chapters on:

l Marine & Coastal Areasl Water resources managementl Long-Term Management of Natural Resources (see video)

It will gather African specialists and government officials, with the objective of developing clear recommendations for implementation of the process, focusing on the 3 thematic areas, infrastructure and governance.

BRAGMA Bridging Actions for GMES & Africa

Newsletter no.6 | October 2013

The GMES & Africa Validation Workshop will take place on the 24/25th of October in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Newsletter no.6 | October 2013

AfricaGIS 2013/GSDI 14 Conference http://www.gsdi.org/gsdiconf/gsdi14/

This international conference is jointly organized by EIS-Africa, GSDI association, the International Geospatial Society, the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) and EiABC Addis Ababa University and will take place in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia from November 4-8, 2013.

The thematic focus of this year’s conference is Spatial Enablement in support of Economic Development and Poverty Reduction.

It is the largest GIS related event that takes place on the African Continent, gathering participants from all over Africa. It offers geospatial specialists from around the world, the opportunity to exchange ideas and lessons-learned on building spatial data infrastructures.

GMES and Africa Activities during AfricaGIS2013/GDSI 2014

BRAGMA is actively participating at AfricaGIS 2013/GDSI 2014, which takes place at the UNECA Conference Centre in Addis Ababa.

BRAGMA will promote GMES and Africa during the Conference by organising a GMES and Africa Panel discussion, presenting two papers in relevant thematic sessions and active engagement with participating stakeholders.

The goal of the GMES and Africa Roundtable Panel discussion is to share the results of progress to date with the GAAP, based on expert consultation and validation workshops in Kenya (Marine and Coastal Areas), Nigeria (Water Resources Management) and Egypt (Long Term Management of Natural Resources), and a planned consolidation workshop in South Africa in October, which will also validate two of the five key Cross-Cutting Issues (Governance and Infrastructure).

Contributing Organisations will include the European Commission, African Union Commission and UN Economic Commission for Africa. Panelists will be announced over the coming weeks.

This GMES and Africa Roundtable is targeted at policy makers and thematic experts as well as public, private, research and education, societal and funding sector stakeholders with an active interest in the contribution that Space and Earth Observation can make to sustainable socio-economic development in Africa, and the role of the strategic partnership between Africa and the EU.

BRAGMA GMES and Africa Stakeholder Conference, Tunisia, December 2013 (tbc)

Funding for BRAGMA activities finished at the end of 2013, and to mark this occasion and consolidate all the work

carried out over the past two years, BRAGMA will organize a final event in Tunis, Tunisia.

This will serve in part as preparation for and to provide recommendations for work required to finalized, validate and endorse the remaining thematic and Cross-Cutting GAAP Chapters and implementation of the three completed GAAP Chapters.

Coordinators of all current GMES and Africa related projects will be invited to contribute, in part, to better consolidate the knowledge and expertise that exists.

4th Africa-EU Summit will take place in Brussels April 2014

The Africa-EU partnership was established in 2007 and represents the framework guiding relations between the continents.

The Strategic Partnership between Africa and the EU pursues common objectives and aims to expand the political dialogue and concrete operation into new areas of shared interest, in a dialogue of equal partners.

AfriGEOSS aims to amongst other things:

l Link current GEO activities with existing capabilities and initiatives in Africa in order to enhance the region’s capacity for producing, managing and using Earth observations.

The Group on Earth Observations (GEO) established the AfriGEOSS initiative, which aims to coordinate the implementation of the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS) and related Earth observation activities in Africa.

l -To identify challenges and put in place measures to enhance Africa’s participation in, and contribution to, the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS).

The official AfriGEOSS launch takes place on Tuesday 05 November 2013 during AfricaGIS 2013/GDSI 2014. The

launch will provide an opportunity for all African Earth observation researchers, practitioners, managers, policy mak-ers and decision makers to learn how to participate and benefit from the GEO platform through AfriGEOSS.

Newsletter no.6 | October 2013

The BRAGMA Project websitehttp://bragma.eu/home/

Here you can find information regarding the project and its scope within GMES & Africa. The following map shows the countries where the BRAGMA partners are from:

The BRAGMA Project also implemented an E-platform which aims to reinforce the discussion on the thematic areas in the scope of GMES & Africa. The platform provides background in-formation about the initiative, as well as public documents.

More than 120 expert members are cur-rently subscribed, and have provided information on their background and interests. All members have access to discussion forums for general discus-sions and forums specifically set up to

support all working groups and the 3 thematic workshops (Marine Workshop - Kenya 2012, Water workshop - Nigeria 2013, Natural Resources Workshop - Egypt 2013).

The “Groups” section is dedicated to supporting the open Working Groups (WGs), which focus on the following themes:

Cross Cutting Issues (governance, fund-ing, strategy, policy etc…)Management of natural resourcesMarine and coastal areasWater resources managementImpacts of climate variability and changeNatural disastersFood security and rural developmentInfrastructures and territorial developmentHealth managementConflicts and political crises

These open Working Groups of experts are dedicated to relevant thematic areas and cross cutting issues that will par-ticipate in the goal-setting for the GMES and Africa Action Plan. All WGs can be joined by individuals in organizations outside of the BRAGMA consortium. Such WGs will assure high visibility to the project’s activities and will provide results in line with the AUC and EU re-quirements for the GMES and Africa Ac-tion Plan.

Within each of these groups there are three dedicated sections:

- Related Projects: this area lists projects based in Africa which are related with the group’s focus. Where cross cutting issues are concerned, due to this being

a vast sector, the projects that are listed deal with more than one topic or cross cutting issue.

- Relevant Links: this section provides links to various sites concerned with the group’s theme, such as sites for regional or world organisations, project delivera-bles or research in that field.

- Relevant Events: this section lists past and future worldwide events regarding the thematic area. Most of the events are based in Africa or discuss the the-matic area from an African perspective.

Participation in any WGs is open and free but subject to registration. To join, send

an email to the BRAGMA Secretariat – secretariat@bragma.eu - stating your WG of interest, area of work and a brief statement of interest in GMES and Africa.

Newsletter no.6 | October 2013

LEARNEO! is an Earth Observation education project funded by the European Space Agency, which aims to increase understanding of satellite data from ESA missions and demonstrate how they can be used to tackle environmental problems in the real world.

Main goals:

- Develop new training resources using data from different sensors on ESA satellites to address real-world problems across a wide variety of environmental themes.

- Stimulate and support the development of an EO education community willing to develop and share EO training resourc-es in the future - beyond the life-span of LearnEO!

This project has a Lesson-writing competition with prizes of €5,000, €3,000 and €2,000 for the best lessons (http://www.learn-eo.org/competition.php).

The competition is open to anyone over 18, using Earth-Observation data, which can participate as an individual or

as part of a team. The topics include any application of Earth Observation, though lessons must include data from ESA missions.

To encourage African participation, the Europe Africa Marine Earth Observation Network (EAMNet) are awarding three [additional] prizes of €1,500 each to authors of the best Afri-can lesson in the LearnEO! competition.

Deadlines5 January 2014: Registration for the LearnEO! competition31 January 2014: Full LearnEO! lesson submission deadline15 February 2014: Application deadline for the supporting EAMNet prize

The EAMNET (Europe Africa Marine Earth Observation Network) project recently launched a discussion forum, EAMNET

alumni forum to facilitate sharing knowledge and experience to support capacity building across Africa.

This is divided in four main topics:

Network members can use the platform to share best practice and discuss new projects, research and tools.

l General discussionl GEONET Cast Receiving Stations

l Satellite data processing & Softwarel Recent African publications & research

Implementation of IRD – NRF Agreement to Strengthen African Regional Cooperation

The objective of the GEODEV (Geotechnologies for Development) project proposed by IRD (Institut de recherché pour le development) and NRF (South African National Research Foundation) is to establish an international network of environmental observatories, to support sustainable development of Southern African countries.

GEODEV aims to guarantee countries in Southern Africa with easy, useful access to remote sensing images and processing capacities. GEODEV will be based on the SEAS-OI (Reunion Island-France), SEAS-Gabon (Libreville-Gabon) and GEOSUD (Montpellier-France) projects with the possibility to access other existing remote sensing receiving facilities. This project should be complementary to other National and International initiatives and in particular GMES & Africa.

Newsletter no.6 | October 2013

Links:http://www.bragma.euhttp://bragma.mixxt.eu/ http://capacity4dev.ec.europa.eu/africa-eu-part.gmes/

Relevant Events - 2013

The 2013 ESA Living planet Symposium took place in Edinburgh from 09 - 13 September With about 1,900 registered participants expected to participate during the entire week

The Open Plenary had around 800 participants and was moderated by the Chief Executive of the UK Space Agency, David Parker, and featured interventions by the UK Minister of State for Universities and Science, the Honourable David Willetts, the Director General of ESA, Jean-Jacques Dordain, Volker Liebig, the ESA Director of Earth Observation Programmes, Philippe Brunet, Director responsible for Aerospace, Maritime, Security and Defence, DG Enterprise and Industry, and Alan O’Neill, Chairman of the ESA Earth Science Advisory Committee.

Symposium participants had nine parallel thematic paper tracks from which to choose. Poster sessions were organised on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday evening, with an open consultation process focused on ESA’s New LP Programme Scientific Challenges taking place in parallel with the Poster Sessions on Tuesday and Wednesday evening. The programme was complemented by an exhibition, which showcased national and European level space activities.

BRAGMA future Events Validation Workshop – which will take place in South Africa, 24-25 October 2013.

AVCOR Workshop

(Active Volcanism & Continental Rifting)12-14 November 2013, Gisenyi ,Rwanda

More information and registration: http://avcor2013.africamuseum.be

European Space Expo

1-6 October 2013, Tallinn, Estonia

http://ec.europa.eu/enterprise/policies/space/expo/index_en.htm

Land Policy Initiative: Partnerships and Coordination

Parallel partnership platform meetings for Development partners and Stake-holders / implementing partners, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

1-2 October 2013, Addis Ababa

http://www.b2match.eu/h2020spacet-our/pages/bremen

The COSMOS Countdown on Horizon 2020 Tour

Stops over in Bremen, Germany 9-10 October 2013 at premises of OHB and AstriumThe detailed agenda and the link to the online registration form can be found here: http://www.b2match.eu/h2020spacetour/pages/bremen