Why Africa must access its maps to shape its future
Dr. Yuliya Tarabalka
VP of Geospatial Solutions, Smart Solutions, Space42
Africa stands at a defining crossroads. With the world’s fastest-growing population and vast natural resources, its potential for transformation is extraordinary. The decisive question becomes how the continent can access the data and insights needed to guide this transformation.
For too long, African nations have planned infrastructure, allocated resources, and responded to crises without reliable base maps that are consistently accessible. This data gap has become a strategic vulnerability that undermines both development goals and investor confidence.
The cost of fragmented data
The problem spans technical, economic, and political dimensions. Spatial data quickly loses value without regular updates, yet across the continent, maps exist only as fragments created by short-term projects. These efforts typically focus on a single city or district, ending when immediate needs are met and leaving behind data that becomes outdated, inaccessible, or lost entirely.
This fragmentation creates a cascade of consequences. Without trusted baseline information, agricultural projects cannot accurately assess risk or scale. Infrastructure investments proceed with incomplete intelligence. Climate adaptation strategies rely on estimates rather than evidence. The result is predictable: development banks hesitate, private investors demand higher risk premiums, and transformative projects struggle to secure funding.
Africa remains a continent without comprehensive base maps, and thus without the foundation for sustainable development or investor trust.
Breaking the cycle: Map Africa’s strategic partnership
The Map Africa Initiative represents a fundamental departure from this pattern. Over the next five years, Space42, Esri, and Microsoft intend to collaborate with African governments and institutions to produce the most comprehensive base map of Africa ever created. Covering all 54 countries and serving 1.5 billion people, the initiative’s most important feature is its strategic partnership model designed to ensure sustained access and capacity building.
This approach delivers four critical elements that previous efforts lacked. First, guaranteed access through long-term licensing agreements which provide African governments with reliable, ongoing access to comprehensive mapping data, with pricing models that reflect development priorities and economic realities.
Second, local capacity building. Space42 and Esri will establish regional hubs to train local experts and transfer technical knowledge, ensuring that the skills to utilize and extend mapping infrastructure are embedded within African institutions.
Third, African partnership governance. Governments across the continent are engaged as strategic partners to guarantee alignment, ensure the initiative reflects continental governance priorities, and address national development needs.
Finally, sustained technology access. Space42 provides cutting-edge satellite data access and AI-powered digital twin models to transform raw imagery into actionable intelligence. Esri orchestrates advanced base map production workflows using GeoAI and remote sensing. Microsoft delivers secure, scalable cloud infrastructure to handle the vast data volumes required. Together, these partnerships ensure Africa gains reliable access to world-class mapping capabilities while building the expertise to maximize their value.
Live maps: A strategic asset
The initiative’s most significant innovation lies in producing live maps: dynamic, continuously updated representations of reality. This capability transforms how Africa can leverage geospatial intelligence and fundamentally changes the continent’s development trajectory.
For governments, live maps mean monitoring floods as they spread, tracking power grid failures as they occur, and observing urban growth as it unfolds. For agriculture ministers, they mean accurate forecasts of crop yields and ensuring that food security strategies are based on evidence rather than estimates. For entrepreneurs, they mean a trusted dataset on which to build new services that fuel Africa’s digital economy. For investors and development banks, they provide confidence that projects are planned with accurate information.
By ensuring sustainable access to live mapping capabilities through strategic partnerships, the initiative guarantees that this advantage grows stronger as the continent becomes more connected and urbanized.
Addressing sustainability and access
Skeptics rightfully ask whether Map Africa creates sustainable access or introduces new dependencies. The initiative’s partnership model directly addresses this concern through several key mechanisms.
Unlike earlier aid-driven efforts that created temporary visibility, Map Africa builds permanent capabilities through technology and skills development. The commercial partnership structure ensures long-term viability while providing African institutions with the tools and training to maximize mapping data value.
Most importantly, the focus on capacity building means that African institutions develop the expertise to create additional data layers, perform advanced analytics, and integrate mapping insights into decision-making processes, capabilities that extend far beyond the base mapping data itself.
A template for strategic data partnerships
Africa’s mapping deficit is extreme, but it is not unique. Many countries in Latin America and Asia struggle with incomplete datasets and outdated maps. Yet, only Africa faces the near-total absence of proper base maps across almost every country, making this initiative both urgent and globally significant.
By demonstrating that strategic partnerships can deliver comprehensive mapping capabilities while building genuine local capacity, Map Africa establishes a new model for how nations can access advanced technologies through sustainable commercial arrangements. Success here creates a blueprint that other regions can adapt, proving that satellites, AI, and cloud infrastructure can be accessed through partnerships that deliver both technical capability and knowledge transfer.
The choice ahead
At its core, mapping is about visibility. Today, it is also about access and capability. African nations face a decisive choice: continue a path of fragmented, short-term mapping efforts that leave gaps and dependencies; or embrace strategic partnerships that provide comprehensive, sustained access to continentalscale mapping capabilities while building local expertise.
Through the Map Africa initiative, the choice is clear. Africa gains the capabilities to use maps effectively - creating the foundation for evidence-based development, investor confidence, and continental transformation.