OLU4Africa nominated for the WSIS Prizes 2022

It’s our pleasure to inform you that Open Land Use for Africa (OLU4Africa) map composition developed within the several INSPIRE Hackathons has been nominated for the World Summit on the Information Society Prizes 2022!

The development of the OLU4Africa dataset started during the Nairobi INSPIRE Hackathon in 2019 by exploring open data sources that could be used to build OLU4Africa. Efforts continued immediately the following year with another African INSPIRE Hackathon, the Kampala INSPIRE Hackathon 2020. That’s when the first land use map of the East Africa region was created. Since then, the dataset has undergone further development in the Open Spring INSPIRE Hackathon and its development will continue even this year during the upcoming – AgriHub INSPIRE Hackathon 2022. The team behind the development of OLU4Africa consists of participants from Uganda, Kenya, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Zambia, Egypt and Tanzania.

The main objective of OLU4Africa is to build an open seamless harmonized vector multipurpose and multilayer land use and land cover map of Africa from available open data sources. OLU4Africa is based on the simultaneously developed OLU data model version 2. Land cover and land use themes are important for many human activities and actions, while their availability and up-to-date validity is a very important aspect. OLU4Africa is being populated by datasets from African regions such as the Africover project and CCI Land Cover 2016 and newer, which has done the land cover mapping of particular African countries. Then, it was possible to use other tags from the OpenStreetMap to identify land use except for the ‘landuse’ tag. For example, ‘natural’, ‘amenity’, ‘leisure’ tags, and so on. ESA CCI LAND COVER (http://2016africalandcover20m.esrin.esa.int/) map and classification of images from Earth observation satellite data are being incorporated into the process of creating the OLU4Africa as well. The data about land cover is derived from Sentinel 2 imagery for the year 2016 and has 20 m spatial resolution. The big advantage of using this dataset is that it covers the whole continent and is relatively new. The disadvantages are related to the nature of the datasets (impossible to provide 100% precision ). 

OLU4Africa will be enriched with other available thematic datasets in the next development; especially focused on current LULC on medium and large scale maps. Availability and accessibility of this product can help for example detect changes in ecosystems at the area of interest from LULC and climatic perspective as well. 

OLU4Africa is being incorporated into the SmartAfriHub (www.smartafrihub.com), a Digital Innovation Hub for Africa. 

OLU4Africa was selected to the 360 nominated projects from a total of 1000 proposals to the WSIS Prizes 2022 contest. Next goal of being part of the selected 90 applications can be supported by YOU –  by YOUR VOTE. OLU4Africa is nominated in the Category 13 “AL C7. E-agriculture”. 

Please, support our colleagues by YOUR VOTE by the end of March! 

How to vote for OLU4Africa?

  1. Registration – please register under the following link, you will receive a verification email with a link
    https://www.itu.int/net4/wsis/stocktaking/Account/Register?ReturnUrl=%2Fnet4%2Fwsis%2Fstocktaking%2FPrizes%2F2022%2FVote
  2. Log in 
  3. In the menu, click on Prizes and then on the Vote button (or directly on the link below)
    https://www.itu.int/net4/wsis/stocktaking/Prizes/2022
  4. Select a category: AL C7.E-agriculture and you can vote