14 DAY TRIAL // The European Space Agency (ESA) announces that it has finished the selection process for twenty projects that will be included in the TIGER II initiative. As part of the program, these projects will receive support from the agency's Earth-observation technologies, to help the people running them get a better idea of how the water-cycle functions in their area. Improved water-monitoring resources will also be made available to the selected proposals, the agency announced on its official website.
The TIGER II initiative is, in fact, a follow-up on the TIGER I research program, which sought to partner ESA with a number of local African authorities, including among others the Lake Chad Basin Commission, the Observatoire du Sahara et du Sahel, in Tunis, the Centre Royal de Teledetection Spatiale, in Morocco, the Zambian Water Authorities, as well as the Regional Center for Mapping Resources for Development (RCMRD), in Nairobi.
The Earth-observation technologies (EO) that ESA supplied were used for very precise practical applications, such as characterizing catchments basins, water quality, groundwater exploration, soil moisture, and for providing monitoring on irrigated agriculture. The end result was to help African authorities devise better, more efficient water management schemes that would ensure the country no longer experiences the dire need for fresh water it did in the past. At this point in time, a large number of Africans still do not have access to clean, potable water, and this is one of the main reasons why a host of dangerous diseases still persist on the continent, in spite of vaccination campaigns.
All of the 20 projects that were selected as part of the TIGER II campaign will receive a number of facilities in conducting their work. They will, for example, be granted discretionary access to EO data and software tools, and will also benefit from the advice of the most renowned specialists in their respective fields. Experts from African countries will also perform various training stages in international laboratories in the European Union, where they will be taught various methods of managing their water with increased efficiency. The dedicated TIGER Capacity Building Facility (TCBF) will support the 20 projects, ESA reports.