Building Bridges from Data to Action: HOT-CSOD at SRI2025 Africa Satellite Event

Louise Mathurin-Serieux, our Senior Associate for Community Projects at Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT), and Kerry-Ann Harriot, Pegasus/Caribbean School of Data (CSOD) Project Manager, landed at the Sustainability Research and Innovation Congress (SRI2025) Africa Satellite Event, which took place from June 4–6, 2025. Over four days, the event was held at the University of Nairobi, Kenya, and to say the agenda was packed with insightful discussions would be an understatement.

HOT’s Pegasus Project, entitled “From Data to Action – Enhancing Caribbean Risk Management through Geospatial Approaches in Jamaica and Saint Lucia”, received an invitation from the FutureEarth team to present during the parallel session “PEGASuS in Action: Innovations from the Global South.” This session featured six recipients of FutureEarth’s Program for Early-stage Grants Advancing Sustainability Science (PEGASuS), who were invited to share their work.

The PEGASuS grant program “seeks to increase knowledge, promote innovation, and establish evidence-based solutions to the world’s most difficult sustainability challenges.” It is funded by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation’s Science Program and administered by FutureEarth.

It was truly an honor to present a HOT Caribbean project alongside six other PEGASuS research teams working across Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Pacific. The 18 hours of air travel from our home countries in the Caribbean (Saint Lucia and Jamaica, respectively) to Kenya did little to diminish our excitement. We were eager to share not only the details of the project but also the background of HOT’s and CSOD’s work in the region, and the strength of our partnership over the years.

It was equally enlightening to learn from the five other presenters in our session, whose projects included:

• Nature-Based Solutions for Nile Wetlands

• Guyana Coastal Analysis System – G-Cas

• Heat-Resistant Crop Varieties in Samoa

• Mangrove Sustainability and Blue Carbon in Kenya

• Soil & Water Management in Brazil’s Araguaia River Basin

Collaboration between Researchers and Local Communities

The session “Public Engagement in Transdisciplinary Research Projects: Networks and Frameworks to Guide Your Work” by EPIC-N, START, and FutureEarth addressed the gaps that often exist between academia and communities.

One key point of discussion was how traditional research training often consults academic literature rather than real-world needs, while NGOs and community organizations may not always engage with scholarly research.

The room reached consensus that a transdisciplinary approach — one that integrates academic, practical, and local knowledge — is essential. We also discussed how traditional research often fails to teach the fundamentals of community engagement, such as building partnerships, understanding power dynamics, and resolving conflict.

A particularly powerful reflection emerged: “How do we rebuild trust with communities who have experienced research fatigue — where disconnected researchers arrive to extract information, and leave without follow-up?”

This session was especially timely. At the time we received the SRI invitation, we were in the midst of stakeholder engagement for our Pegasus project in Jamaica and Saint Lucia. Our approach is rooted in participatory action research (PAR) — engaging all relevant actors in defining the research problems, developing questions, gathering and analyzing data, and crafting recommendations together.

This also brought to mind HOT’s commitment to localization, ensuring that interventions are tailored to the needs of communities and guided by their leadership.

Mapping for Sustainable Development

While open mapping wasn’t a central focus of the congress, the sessions that did feature it were engaging and insightful. Even with our years of experience in GIS and open mapping, we were struck by the breadth of innovative solutions that are being developed using these tools.

One standout session was titled: “Mapping a Sustainable Future: Integrating Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI), Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI), and Open Data for African Development.”

Led by Dr. Julia Quaicoe of the University of Cape Coast, Ghana, the session began with an introduction to VGI and SDI. Dr. Kholofelo Mampeule then presented the distributed partnership model of Digital Earth Africa, highlighting platforms like GeoMAD, Landsat, and Water Observations from Space (WOFS) — all freely available for commercial and public use.

Later, Confidence Kpodo from OSM Ghana / YouthMappers discussed how volunteer geospatial data helps bridge data gaps, particularly where official data is scarce or nonexistent. She spoke to the community impact of VGI — improving accessibility, civic engagement, infrastructure planning, and local capacity building.

Importantly, she acknowledged the role HOT plays in developing tools and mobilizing volunteers in support of this mission.

Women and Climate Resilience

Another deeply impactful session was titled: “Empowering Rural Women for Climate Resilience: Bridging Gender Gaps and Advancing Women in Entrepreneurship for Mitigation and Adaptation.”

Mary Chibwe, the lead organizer, shared her work on how women are disproportionately affected by disasters, particularly droughts and floods in Zambia. She gave examples of how poor water and sanitation services impact maternal and menstrual health, how food scarcity often leaves women responsible for difficult decisions, and how displacement and shelter conditions can lead to exposure to sexual violence and loss of privacy.

Chibwe also showcased several initiatives in Zambia where women are leading efforts to combat the effects of climate change.

This session reminded us of HOT’s Women in SIDS project, where women mappers from Small Island Developing States led projects to build community resilience in the face of intensified storms and flooding.

Before traveling to Kenya, we were already in conversations with local actors across the Caribbean to continue supporting women-led climate resilience efforts, and this session reaffirmed the urgency and relevance of that work.

Reflections and Next Steps

This experience has undoubtedly inspired a renewed motivation to pay close attention to how we engage with communities at every stage of the project. Scrutinising our ongoing engagements to ensure that in our interactions we are being humans first – with empathy and compassion for our local actors and communities and deep understanding of their needs; and researchers and innovators second. But in the same vein, learning more about all of the hard work and commitment that has gone into so many innovative research projects around the world and how they are impacting communities has also brought to mind a reminder of how important our work towards reducing data and information poverty is – ensuring that communities can access the data that they need to better understand their challenges and develop solutions that lead to sustainable change.

We would like to thank FutureEarth for inviting us and making this possible as well as everyone who welcomed us to Kenya and assisted us as we navigated the space including the team at the University of Nairobi. Many thanks to our HOT and CSOD team members whose tireless efforts resulted in the work that we shared at the forum. We look forward to continued conversations and knowledge exchange with the other project teams via emails and hopefully in one day, in another SRI.