Digital Earth Africa has been founded on a number of Governing Principles. These sit at the heart of who we are and what we do.
Accountability and transparency
- Responsive to African priorities
- Agile, nimble and actions oriented
Diversity and inclusion
- Multi-sector perspectives
- Span data communities
- Foster collaboration
Operational Service
- Continental-scale
- Sustainable
- Domain expertise
Open and Free Data
- Interoperability
- Privacy and Integrity
- Accountability and transparency. The decision-making process of the governance framework should be accountable and transparent to the broader DE Africa community.
- Continental-scale data, products and operational services. DE Africa will provide an operational service delivering data and products available for the entire continent.
- Responsive to African priorities. DE Africa will be responsive to the needs, challenges and priorities across countries while leveraging and building on existing capacity to ensure uptake of data products into decision-making processes.
- Foster national and regional collaboration. DE Africa will align to existing regional mechanisms and drive uptake at the national levels to address policy challenges at both levels.
- Open and free data. DE Africa will be a public good providing free and open data and products to all its users.
- Sustainability. DE Africa will develop a value proposition that supports a sustainable business and funding model by engaging countries, thus ensuring delivery of DE Africa products and services in the long-term.
- Diversity and inclusion. DE Africa will seek to be an exemplar of diversity and inclusiveness. The governance framework will be mindful particularly of gender and geographic diversity in its makeup at all levels.
- Incorporate multi-sector perspectives to maximise benefits. The Governance of DE Africa will include representation from across sectors, recognising that DE Africa will deliver the greatest possible value through being useful to a broad ecosystem of information users. Representation is sought from government, the private sector, civil society, academia, international organisations, foundations and others.
- Incorporate perspectives from across data communities. DE Africa products will provide benefit across data communities, especially as the ecosystem develops and Earth observation data is combined with other data sources. Therefore, representation will be valued from a range of data communities (e.g. national statistics, telco data, open data, other big data, citizen generated data).
- Incorporate domain expertise. DE Africa will provide data products useful for agriculture and food security, water access and quality, deforestation, mining, disaster response, climate change, and more. Expertise from these domains will be needed to validate approaches and outcomes, and therefore organisations with specific domain expertise aligned to the vision and work programme for DE Africa may be included in DE Africa governance bodies.
- Agile, nimble and action oriented. The governance of DE Africa recognises that the intent of DE Africa is to actively deliver, adapt and iterate as needed, and to develop existing capacity to make a real-world difference. The governance must not become overly bureaucratic or top-down such that it stifles work and action.
- Interoperability. DE Africa will be based on an open data infrastructure and FAIR2 principles to ensure DE Africa can connect with other platforms and infrastructures to share data, products and algorithms.
- Privacy and Integrity. DE Africa will ensure that privacy concerns of personal data and those data with national and regional security concerns are handled with integrity and confidentiality according to internationally accepted standards and protocols.