Regional Marine Centre

The Observatory for Biodiversity and Protected Areas in West Africa (OBAPAO) has organized a five (05) day workshop in Geographic information system (GIS) for protected area managers in West Africa. The training which took place from 18th to 22nd May 2022 in Dakar, Senegal, drew 16 participants from five (5) West African countries (The Gambia, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Ghana and Nigeria). The participants included officers from environment protection agencies and protected area authorities. This training was a follow up to the first session was held in Conakry (Republic of Guinea) earlier this year (12th to 15th April 2022), which brought together representatives from Guinea, Guinea Bissau, Mali, Mauritania and Senegal. Group photograph of training participants In his opening remarks, Oumar Sarr, Director of Administration and Finance (Centre de Suivi Ecologique) urged the participants to take advantage of the training to increase their knowledge in GIS and its applications. Mr. Oumar Sar

ByteForce emerged as the 1st runner up at the final of the #OceanChallenge4Africa Hackathon organized by the Copernicus Marine Service and Mercator Ocean International in April 2022. Over 90 teams across Africa offered technological and innovative solutions to challenges that the continent is facing within the maritime domain. The challenge engaged in several pre-events, evaluating and perusing ideas from the teams and eventually selecting 35 teams for the final event. The ByteForce team tendered a solution in the topic area of "A productive ocean" leveraging data from the Copernicus Marine Service, an API of the Global Fishing Watch, EMODnet-biology and a virtual computing platform of the Copernicus access hub. Home page ByteForce application to monitor illegal fishing The mobile application detects and maps potential fishing zones and as well the activity and location of fishing vessels providing statistical information on the effort of each vessel off the coasts of Africa