Airbus Defence & Space: Satellite Image Analysis for Operational Maintenance of a Property Database for Dakar City, Senegal – Legacy Evaluation Report

Maintaining up-to-date and accurate information about all assets and services owned and operated by organisations is essential for good governance. Often insufficient attention or resources are provided to ensure this occurs and in rapidly changing environments, such as exist in the developing world where increasing urbanisation is a major factor, information about land and property is all too often inaccurate, considerably out of data and not maintained in any meaningful way.

The Dakar Change project commenced in January 2017 and was completed in December 2018, with final reporting completed in February 2019. It was undertaken by Airbus and local partner, New Africa Consulting (NAC), with funding from UK Space Agency (UKSA) under their International Partnership Programme (IPP). The project concerned the use of satellite imagery as a means of detecting change to buildings to be used to assist in developing a city-wide property-based revenue generation system for the city of Dakar in Senegal. It was developed because of the prior experience of Airbus Defence and Space in Senegal in the broad area of land administration and how geospatial applications could be utilised to improve efficiency in the management of property data. In doing so, the project provided the means to keep a database of land and property up-to-date at minimal cost.