Digital Earth Africa and AWS are making satellite data work for Africa

This article describes how Digital Earth Africa and AWS have partnered to make satellite data accessible and actionable across the African continent through cloud infrastructure.

• Digital Earth Africa hosts six petabytes of satellite data in AWS regions, serving 29,000+ active users and 50+ government ministries
• Water Observations from Space (WOfS) maps surface water dynamics across Africa since the 1980s using Landsat imagery
• Waterbodies Monitoring Service tracks individual water body changes; Water Quality Monitoring Service launched in 2026 for real-time continental monitoring
• Coastlines Monitoring Service maps Africa's shoreline changes over 24 years to track erosion and growth at national and local levels
• AWS infrastructure in Cape Town and Frankfurt regions uses EKS, EC2, S3, Lambda, RDS, Cognito, and GuardDuty for compute and storage
• Real-world applications include monitoring Lake Ngami in Botswana, Lake Sulunga in Tanzania, and coastal erosion in Senegal
• Services enable governments, researchers, and communities to make data-driven decisions on water management, coastal planning, and ecosystem health

The partnership demonstrates how cloud infrastructure enables long-term environmental monitoring at continental scale, supporting African decision-makers with open, accessible satellite data.