UG-GMES Youth Capacity Strengthening Agenda Bearing Fruit

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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 using a machine learning algorithm built with python. Consequently, fishery regulatory authorities will have leeway in their bid to enforce laws and regulations through the app, which allows them to monitor and specify the amount of time to be spent fishing, display vessels with authorization and allowed fishing zones.
 
Image of a page of the ByteForce application

Mr Yvan Wonkap from Cameroon, the lead of the ByteForce team was one of the beneficiaries of the "GMES and Africa Incubation Challenge 2021" held in Accra from August to September 2021.

Mr Yvan Wonkap, Cameroon

The team has since been beefed up with Mr Curtis Akapini Apegiwine an intern of the GMES and Africa project and national service personnel at the Regional Marine Centre, University of Ghana. The other two members are Adouli Abdelkarim from Morocco and Sifikile Bukhali from Zambia.

Mr Curtis Akapini (left) of the RMC and Mr Fifi Adodo, Market Development and Outreach Officer (right) at Mercator Ocean on a visit to the University of Ghana

The #OceanChallenge4Africa hackathon took place fully online in April 2022, bringing together participants to find solutions to address challenges in coastal and marine environments in Africa. Teams were invited to create innovative and impact-driven ocean solutions using marine earth-observation data, to contribute to the sustainable use of ocean and coastal resources in Africa.

Some Mentors of the#OceanChallenge4Africa Hackathon

Other partners of the #OceanChallenge4Africa are IOC, Blue Planet, EUMETSAT, EMODnet, Segal Family Foundation, United Nations Environment Programme GEMS Ocean, GEO Blue Planet and the African Group on Earth Observations (AfriGEO).

Certificate awarded to the team

The coastal and marine environments in Africa expand over 35,000 kilometres of coastline in 38 countries on the continent and deliver numerous ecosystem services, among which food provisioning, climate regulation, cultural benefits, tourism, and shipping, to name just a few. While the ocean holds a vital role in the lives of many African communities and offers many opportunities, it is also threatened by climate change and increasing pressures derived from human activities, affecting the health and resilience of marine environments and biodiversity.

Source: https://www.eu4oceanobs.eu/event/oceanchallenge4africa-hackathon/

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