Floods that can be tracked as they unfold. Road networks mapped with centimetre-level precision. Ports, power lines, informal settlements and croplands appearing on screen as they shift and expand. A continent-wide live basemap with which African governments can anticipate the impact of extreme weather, design cities with accuracy, and plan agricultural cycles.
Map Africa - a new partnership led by Abu Dhabi's Space42 with Esri and Microsoft - is the latest attempt to turn these long-standing ambitions into reality. The project aims to build a continuously updated digital map of all 54 African states, positioning geospatial data as a foundation for future growth.
The continent's mapping ecosystem today is largely the product of fragmented, purpose-specific initiatives. Humanitarian projects such as Missing Maps or Tanzania's Ramani Huria generated essential datasets for flood risk and informal settlements while research efforts like AfriPop later absorbed into WorldPop tried to fill demographic gaps using satellite imagery. A few governments, notably South Africa, have built national spatial data infrastructures. But these remain isolated cases.
