Countries in SSA developing EO systems to support agriculture and food security should invest in the following
actions:
(i) developing and supporting the requisite human capital of African EO specialists to develop home grown solutions and leverage recent advancements and strategic support from international partners, through targeted training programs
(ii) stronger partnerships between government and Universities with direct and clear funding streams to support research developing local solutions
(iii) develop models, tools and the capacity to measure progress, impacts and to support design and implementation of appropriate mitigation, response and adaptation programs.
(iv) consistent representative digital ground data through networks of observers to provide the data required to train EO-based systems. The machine learning community is hungry for data labels to develop and train models that are desperately needed for monitoring and measuring smallholder agriculture, but these cannot be collected on a project to project basis.
(v) clear mechanisms for data sharing to ensure mutual benefit. The lack of open and clear data sharing policies have largely impeded research and model development
(vi) developing and implementing communication strategies for threat levels, with strong emphasis on reaching impacted communities
(vii) permanent budget lines for early warning and assessment as well as sustained investment and sustenance of computing and internet infrastructure