Africa has launched its first continent-wide space agency, headquartered in Cairo, to coordinate national space programmes and expand access to climate and weather data at a time of rising environmental vulnerability and declining foreign support, Bloomberg reports.

The African Space Agency, operating under the African Union, officially began operations last month and is currently recruiting for key technical and administrative roles. Its primary mandate is to unify fragmented space initiatives across member states, launch satellites, and establish a data-sharing infrastructure to improve forecasting and disaster preparedness.

“Space activities on the continent have been happening in a very fragmented fashion,” said Meshack Kinyua, a space engineer and veteran of Africa’s space policy community who now oversees capacity-building at the new agency, cited by Bloomberg. “The African Space Agency brings a coordination mechanism and economies of scale — it puts all members of the African Union at an equal level in terms of gathering data that they can access according to their needs.”

The move comes as the availability of high-resolution climate and weather data becomes increasingly restricted, particularly following cuts to US-led development assistance. Under the Trump administration, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) ended funding for 80% of its projects, including SERVIR, a key initiative in partnership with NASA that supported climate monitoring and disaster response in developing countries.

The loss of such programmes has made it more difficult for African governments to access the data required to issue weather alerts or build accurate long-term climate models. “We need to ensure that African satellites can improve measurements and fill data gaps,” Kinyua said. “These gaps will always be there, and we need to fill some of them ourselves, and engage with other agencies.”

Africa remains the most climate-vulnerable region globally, despite contributing relatively little to global carbon emissions. Limited weather infrastructure has left many countries unable to track extreme weather events or prepare for long-term environmental shifts.

The new agency aims to scale up local successes, including early warning systems for fishermen in West Africa and communities along the Congo River basin. “The African Space Agency is a step toward changing that,” Kinyua said.