EO and Communities Together for Data-Driven Evidence
ONEKANA (‘to make visible’ in Swahili) is an Earth Observation research project (2023-2025) funded by the STEREO-IV programme of the Belgian Science Policy.
Its overall scientific objective is to explore the potential of EO and Citizen Science to study how and why urban dwellers in the Global South experience different levels of exposure and susceptibility to heat in disadvantaged settlements.
With this project, we want to make urban thermal inequality visible using AI and EO with the participation of local communities.
ONEKANA tackles key scientific challenges: EO predictors (e.g., land surface temperature, vegetation indices) often relate only weakly to air temperature, and data on air temperature, thermal susceptibility, and population are scarce.
We hypothesise that combining open/low-cost Earth Observation, geospatial, and Citizen Science data makes it possible to pinpoint areas of both higher heat and greater susceptibility, and to estimate the affected population for the prioritisation of local adaptation measures towards greener, more sustainable cities.
This research builds on the SLUMAP and PARTIMAP projects, in which we developed EO and Citizen Science methods for mapping disadvantaged urban areas and capturing the perception of deprivation by local communities.
Our work focuses on Nairobi (Kenya) and Lagos (Nigeria), with a pilot in Buenos Aires (Argentina) to test transferability across continents.
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On June 30 2025
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Urban dialogue on Earth Observation-based modelling for making thermal inequality visible in African cities - 27 June 2025, Nairobi (onsite) and Lagos (online)
On June 30 2025, by Sabine Vanhuysse
In June 2025, ONEKANA held stakeholder workshops in Nairobi and Lagos to share project results and spark dialogue on urban thermal inequality. Using settlement maps (project outputs), participants connected scientific data with their own lived experience. Communities, planners, and academics came together to identify vulnerable areas and discuss practical adaptation strategies. The workshops revealed both shared and city-specific challenges, offering lessons for scaling community-based low-cost measures across African cities. Stakeholder workshop participants, Nairobi (organised in collaboration with Naipolitans)
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44th EARSeL Symposium (26-29 May 2025, Prague)
On May 24 2025, by Sabine Vanhuysse
Check out the 44th EARSeL Symposium!
8th EARSeL Workshop on the Global South, Tuesday 27th May 2025: We will present our work on air temperature modelling, thermal susceptibility modelling, and the relationships between urban morphology and socioeconomic status in African cities.
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