Building Effective Partnerships in Delivery of Geo-Information Services for Societal Benefit.

The Eastern Africa region faces diverse environmental and climatic challenges which pose a significant risk to development planning and growth. Frequent floods, droughts, and wildfires can reverse gains made on regional resilience to the effects of climate change and environmental degradation. Often, governments, emergency and humanitarian organizations and development partners are likely to act unilaterally in response to environmental hazards. To ensure synergy and coherence in building resilience, the USAID supported partners in Kenya coordinate their activities under a partnership unit known as the Partnership for Resilience and Economic Growth (PREG). Here we highlight the importance of collaborative implementation of development objectives, especially for projects working in the same geographical zone. The work highlights succinct examples of synergies identified in provision of geospatial information services to partners working to improve the resilience of communities in water access and forage and grazing units' management in arid areas. The SERVIR Eastern and Southern Africa project (a partnership of the Regional Centre for Mapping of Resources for Development, (RCMRD), USAID and NASA) worked with county governments in Kenya and the Kenya Rapid project to improve digitization of grazing blocks in arid counties in northern Kenya. Further, the partners have used NASA satellite datasets and well ground water sensors to elucidate the functional relationships between ground water use and rainwater availability in arid areas. Our findings underscore the importance of aligning goals and partnerships to achieve a common objective, thus making mutually beneficial collaborations and the value of geo-spatial information services synergistic. Through this work, partners are building tools and data products that will lead to improved understanding and management of scarce water and grazing resources, thus minimizing conflicts and increasing resilience of communities.