THE GARNET E PROJECT. TOWARDS BETTER EMERGENCY RESPONSE IN AFRICA

At the highest level, the overarching objective of GARNET-E is to contribute to the partial re-alignment of the ‘GMES Emergency Response in Africa’ agenda, from technical activities focussed purely on risk and poverty reduction and response using European capabilities, to those more directed to building sustainable local capacities, leading to real wealth creation in Africa.
This will be achieved through the two sub-objectives; firstly to enable the integration of African requirements in the definition of future operation of the GMES Emergency Response Service in Africa; and secondly to encourage the strengthening and building of regional and local capabilities in order to allow African users and policy makers to access Earth Observation-derived information provided by the Emergency Response Service.
The project also aims at enhancing information exchange, mainly through training workshops on the operations of GMES Emergency Response and the International Charter Space and Major Disaster, as well as to improve the quality and efficacy of the GMES Emergency Response Service itself, through consideration of requirements gathering exercised and the ingestion of in situ data.
GARNET-E is fundamentally about engagement of people and organisations in a development process. Ultimately the success of the project will be measured by the likelihood of any future implementation of the GMES Emergency Response Service in Africa.