Vision

In 2025, the African space industry is worth twenty-four billion nine hundred and fifty million dollars. It is growing at a compound annual rate of nearly eight percent. If the trajectory holds, it will cross the thirty-nine-billion-dollar mark in 2030. Fifteen African countries have already invested more than four and a half billion dollars in satellite development and construction. Sixty-five satellites have been launched from the continent or for African states since 1998. More than twenty-one African states now have a formal national space programme.

These figures are accurate. They appear in every report. They impress investors and reassure policymakers. They tell a story of growth, momentum, of a continent waking up. And that is exactly why they should be approached with caution.

Because these numbers measure aggregates - the value of an industry, the size of a market, the count of objects in orbit. They never measure what matters most to me: how many Ivorian farmers received a satellite-derived weather alert last year before a downpour ravaged their plot? How many municipalities in the country's interior have an up-to-date map of their road network? How many fishermen along the Gulf of Guinea were warned, by SMS, that a depression was forming offshore? How many children in flood-prone districts of Abidjan were evacuated thanks to an early-warning system fed by Earth observation data?

I do not have answers to these questions. As far as I know, no one measures them systematically at continental scale. And until someone does - until that ratio between the economic weight of the industry and its verified, concrete usefulness to populations becomes the principal metric of the sector - the risk is real: that of building an African space economy that is African by its geography of production, but foreign to the daily lives of Africans.

This manifesto begins with that tension. It does not attack the industry. It simply proposes to redefine what it means to succeed in African space - to shift the centre of gravity from what takes off to what changes.

A satellite is not an end in itself. It is an observation infrastructure, no different in principle from a ground weather station, a hydrometric gauge, or a national park surveillance camera. Its value is not measured by its orbital altitude, by its cost, or by the prestige of the launcher that placed it. It is measured by the quality, frequency and relevance of the decisions it enables, on the ground, for those who need them.

When torrential rains hit Abidjan in June 2024, claiming more than twenty lives, satellite data already existed. European Meteosat spacecraft provide continuous, twenty-four-seven coverage of the African continent. The Ivorian meteorological services, led by Mr Daouda Konate - now First Vice-President of the World Meteorological Organization - did issue an orange alert, almost certainly saving many lives. But the death toll, even reduced, remained unacceptable. The data existed. The expertise existed. What was partially missing was the transmission chain between the orbital data point and the civil protection cell of the most exposed neighbourhood. That chain is the heart of the profession that must emerge.

I take a position that may not be the most glamorous, but is the most useful: the future profession of African space is not that of satellite builder. It is that of downstream value-chain architect. The professional who transforms a raw Sentinel or Landsat data feed into an SMS alert that is actually received, into a square metre of roof tarped before the storm, into a sack of seeds protected, into a school lesson not lost because a teacher could be warned of the flood in time. The profession of the last hundred metres between orbit and ground.

This profession is undervalued by rankings, underfunded by donors, underrepresented at conferences. It is nevertheless the only one that democratically justifies massive public investment in space, on a continent where other social priorities remain pressing. As long as the African citizen does not see, in their own daily life, the concrete return of every dollar spent in orbit, space investment will remain politically fragile, economically questionable, socially questionable.

The word sovereignty has become, in African space discourse over the past five years, a mantra. It appears in speeches by Dr Tidiane Ouattara, President of the Council of the African Space Agency. It runs through national roadmaps. It punctuates post-conference communiques. In its common usage, it designates the capacity of a country or a continent to design, manufacture and operate its own satellites without external dependency. That definition is legitimate. In my view, it is profoundly incomplete.

Real technological sovereignty is not the material possession of objects. It is the mastery of the decision-making chains those objects feed. A country that owns a satellite but whose downstream services depend entirely on a foreign operator to process, host, secure and distribute its data is not sovereign - it has merely substituted one dependency for another, more subtle and more lasting. A country that owns no satellite but whose administration is trained to exploit open global datasets (Sentinel, Landsat, MODIS), whose ecosystem of local SMEs can derive useful products from them, whose regulation clearly mandates data sovereignty on national soil, is in practice more sovereign than the first.

This inversion of perspective has practical consequences I want to state plainly, and which may not please everyone.

1. First consequence. Every dollar invested in manufacturing an African satellite without parallel, equal-or-greater investment in training downstream operators is a dollar of suspect social return. A satellite without a downstream is a prestige object.

2. Second consequence. Continental training programmes - CRASTE-LF for the Francophone zone, RCSSTEAP for the Asian partnership, and emerging national programmes - must broaden their curricula well beyond pure satellite engineering to integrate, at scale, geospatial data science, decision-system software engineering, and user-product design.

3. Third consequence. African space agencies must publish, at regular intervals, not launch reports but use reports. How many tonnes of harvest saved by satellite-fed weather alerts? How many hectares of forest protected by early-cut detection? How many lives spared by flood early-warning systems? Without that kind of accounting, there is no public stewardship.

Until those three consequences are drawn, the word sovereignty remains a flag. Once they are, it becomes a policy.

The African space ecosystem today has two well-identified populations, generally adequate in number: institutional decision-makers - agency presidents, senior officials, diplomats - and high-level satellite engineers, trained in continental and international engineering schools, sometimes returning home after doctorates abroad. Between the two, an entire layer is missing. That layer is the layer of operators.

By operators I mean the population of technicians, junior engineers, software developers, data analysts, GIS specialists, product designers, trainers, whose daily work consists of transforming political mandate and scientific data into useful service. This population does not headline conferences. It does not sign international treaties. It does not pose with presidents. But without it, nothing reaches deployment. Yet at continental scale, this layer is notoriously thin in numbers, and methodologically under-equipped where it does exist.

The deficit is particularly acute in Francophone Africa. Where Anglophone ecosystems - South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria, Egypt - began building an operator generation in the 2010s through dense university partnerships, well-capitalised local startups, and better-funded national agencies, the Francophone space (Cote d'Ivoire, Senegal, Cameroon, Benin, Gabon, and the broader West and Central African sub-region) is five to ten years behind. The structures exist - AGEOS in Gabon, CRASTE-LF in Morocco, the Ivorian Space Agency now being structured, the UVCI / INPHB / ESATIC academic ecosystem in Cote d'Ivoire - but the intermediate operator fabric remains to be woven.

I do not believe this gap can be closed by decree. I believe it will close through the cumulative action, over the next five to ten years, of a cohort of Francophone operators who choose to remain on the continent, deliver projects, document what they do, train their successors, and collectively structure their profession. I want to be part of that cohort. I want to contribute to it concretely.

The global space imagination is colonised by five dominant narratives: the race to the Moon, the conquest of Mars, orbital tourism, mega-connectivity constellations, and space defence. These narratives are powerful, media-attractive, and mobilise considerable budgets. For Africa, they are a strategic distraction.

African space priorities, as they emerge both from official roadmaps (African Union Agenda 2063, Africa EO Roadmap, GMES & Africa programme) and from clear-eyed observation of ground realities, are of another order. They are daily. They are rarely spectacular. They are fundamental.

I rank them as follows, taking responsibility for the ranking.

1. Climate-smart agriculture. Agriculture remains, on this continent, the principal economic activity of hundreds of millions of people. Ongoing climate change is upending crop calendars, displacing rainfall zones, intensifying both droughts and floods. Earth-observation satellite data is the most powerful and least expensive tool available to help farmers adapt. Any investment in satellite-assisted, climate-smart African agriculture is, to my eyes, an absolute priority.

2. Early warning for natural hazards. Urban floods, landslides, cyclones, coastal erosion, bush fires. The UN "Early Warnings for All" objective by 2027 is a reference framework to be exploited fully. For Cote d'Ivoire, whose Abidjan economy is exposed to torrential rains, the issue is immediate. For Sahelian countries, soil erosion and groundwater degradation are satellite-measurable. For West African coastal states, shoreline erosion threatens hundreds of villages.

3. Natural-resource governance. Illegal artisanal mining drains African states of billions in fiscal revenue and destroys entire ecosystems. Illegal fishing in West African territorial waters represents, by UN estimates, more than two billion dollars in annual losses. Deforestation, particularly in the Congo Basin and in Cote d'Ivoire, accelerates. Satellite imagery is, in all those cases, the most effective surveillance tool.

4. Urban planning and infrastructure. Africa is the fastest-urbanising continent in the world. The cities of the 2030s - Abidjan, Lagos, Kinshasa, Nairobi, Cairo - are being built right now under conditions that demand rigorous spatial planning. Satellite imagery makes it possible to map informal settlements, plan utility networks, and identify under-served areas. It is a tool of urban justice.

5. Rural connectivity. Low-Earth-orbit constellations (Starlink, OneWeb, and progressively continental actors) can cover, at reasonable cost, territories that fibre will never reach economically. The challenge is no longer technical - it is regulatory and one of business model.

This ranking is undoubtedly debatable. It is, in any case, mine. And I commit to orienting my technical work, my project choices, and my public statements in coherence with it.

Within parts of the African innovation ecosystem, an imaginary of resourcefulness has taken hold. Creativity is praised, agility is celebrated, the capacity to improvise with little is admired. That capacity is real. It is also, sometimes, the antechamber of amateurism - and that amateurism is costly.

A space-innovation project delivered without written functional specifications is not just one more project - it is a project that cannot be picked up, audited, or extended by anyone else. An early-warning system deployed without a quality plan is not a public service - it is a demonstration. A data platform that does not document its architecture is not infrastructure - it is a fragile asset whose author's departure will mark its end.

Drawing on my experience as analyst-designer at Adinrin Intelligence Systems, my internships at the General Treasury of Divo and the UVCI FabLab, I claim a methodological discipline that may seem austere and is, in reality, deeply liberating. Detailed Functional Specifications. Technical Functional Specifications. Project Quality Plans. Management Quality Plans. UML diagrams. BPMN models. Use cases. Documented database architectures. Reproducible tests. Versioning. Public documentation.

This rigour is not a colonial inheritance to be shed. It is not a bureaucratic constraint to be circumvented. It is the exact opposite: it is the instrument by which an African project becomes transmissible, therefore durable, therefore sovereign. A rigorously documented deliverable no longer belongs to its sole designer alone - it belongs to the professional community that can take it up, improve it, contest it, extend it. That is how a national technical heritage is built over time.

I commit personally to ensuring that every project I deliver in my career, whether for a private client, an institutional partner or my own account, is accompanied by technical documentation of a standard at least equivalent to that demanded by the most structured continental agencies. Not as a formality. As a political conviction.

No global space ecosystem was built in autarky. NASA itself was born from a massive post-war absorption of European competencies. ESA is by construction a multilateral cooperation. China's space programme was built on decades of transfers, negotiated or otherwise. India's first steps came with Soviet support. To imagine that Africa could do without dense international partnerships would be a strategic blunder.

But not all partnerships are equal, and lucidity is required.

I distinguish three types of cooperation that I consider structurally positive. South-south cooperation between emerging space powers - India, Brazil, South Africa, and increasingly China - which operates under economic conditions compatible with African budgets and which effectively transfers competence. European cooperation through the Copernicus, GMES & Africa, and EUMETSAT programmes, which opens data access and funds training, on condition that the African side comes to the table with defined projects and real absorption capacity. University and scientific cooperation, more diffuse but cumulatively decisive.

By contrast, I am wary, and I invite institutional leaders and young innovators to be collectively wary, of partnerships that exhibit any of the following three traits: marked asymmetry in the ownership of processed data (data collected on African soil must remain juridically African, full stop); proprietary technological lock-in that makes the African actor dependent on an external licence for any future operation; absence of measurable, audited skill-transfer clauses.

I say this while fully assuming, and publicly valuing, the cooperations from which I have personally benefited: the training co-organised by CRASTE-LF (Morocco) and RCSSTEAP-China in partnership with Beihang University (Beijing), which certified me in CubeSat technology; the official invitations from the African Space Agency and AGEOS to the GMES & Africa Forum in Cairo and the NewSpace Africa Conference in Libreville. These cooperations worked because they satisfied the three criteria I just outlined. They enriched me without alienating me. I want that to remain the norm.

To close this manifesto, I want to project a horizon. I set it at twenty years - the duration of a professional generation, the time it takes for a cohort entering the field today at twenty-two to reach leadership maturity at forty-two. This horizon is not a political programme. It is a personal framework of commitment.

By 2030, four years from now, I want at least ten public or private services in Cote d'Ivoire to be exploiting daily, in a documented and auditable manner, satellite data to produce a measurable service to citizens. I want the African Space Agency to publish its first annual usage report, distinct from the industry annual report. I want the Eburnie Space Foundation, of which I am a member, to have made ASPEX 2026 a continental tipping point - not one summit more, but a summit that will have produced quantified operational commitments.

By 2036, ten years from now, I want a Francophone generation of space operators to be identifiable, networked, structured. I want at least fifty African projects of satellite-data-to-service transformation to have been brought to completion, publicly documented, and transferred to their using administrations. I want Africa's place in global conferences to be measured no longer by the number of delegates but by the number of successful use cases presented.

By 2046, twenty years from now, I want the very question of African space sovereignty to have changed nature, because sovereignty will have become a functional reality rather than a political objective. I want African urban dwellers to receive, as a banality, integrated alerts from African constellations operated by African operators with AI models developed on the continent. I want African universities to train every year cohorts of operators of which half stay, and that the half that stays be the brightest. I want a child in Divo, or in Bamako, or in Goma, to no longer need to dig through a rubbish heap for an object to repair in order to discover the desire to build - because the tools of creation will finally have become, at their school, accessible.

A vision without personal commitment is mere commentary. Here, in closing, are the six promises I make to those who will read this text.

1. I will deliver no project without complete technical documentation. Detailed functional specifications, technical specifications, architecture, quality plan, commented code. Without exception, regardless of the project's budget.

2. I will sign no international partnership that fails to meet the three criteria laid out in section VII. African data sovereignty, no proprietary lock-in, measurable skill transfer.

3. I will devote at least a quarter of my professional time to transmission. Mentoring students at the UVCI FabLab, mentoring young developers, contributing to the Francophone training of space operators.

4. I will publish, every year, on this very page, a public account of the year past. Projects delivered, partnerships established, training given, and - most importantly - commitments from this page that I failed to keep, with their reasons.

5. I will refuse posturing. No media over-investment at the expense of deliverables. No discourse without an underlying project. No conference attendance I cannot justify by concrete work.

6. I will remain, as much as I can, the reserved child from Divo. The one who, at sixteen, picked a charred toy car out of a rubbish heap and rebuilt it with flattened tin cans. That discipline is the source of everything that came after. That discipline must remain.