## 5 Strategic Partnerships for Capacity Building: Relevance for AU-Agenda 2063
The plugin has been used extensively, as it provides participants with a well-structured and easy-to-learn workflow to develop land cover, inland water bodies, inland water quality, evapotranspiration, agricultural water use, and flood monitoring products, among others, which are essential for supporting integrated water resources management. TIGER and similar capacity-building programs focusing on integrated water resources management are essential for addressing the policy frameworks such as African Water Vision 2025, the NEPAD Environment Action Plan, and support water-related decision-making at local scales towards achieving AU-Agenda 2063 goal 7 targets to preserve at least 17% of terrestrial and inland water. Figure 8 shows participants of the TIGER capacity building workshop held in South Africa in 2015. Recently, SANSA has partnered with the African Union Development Agency (AUDA-NEPAD) to provide, among other things, capacity building for the use of Earth observation and other geospatial tools to fast-track planning, implementation and monitoring of AU-Agenda 2063 and the UN-SDGs. As part of this objective, two training workshops were held in partnership with AUDA-NEPAD. The training workshops also exposed participants to a wide range of FOSS tools, access to free and open Earth observation data and their utility for environmental monitoring and assessment, agricultural optimization to achieve food security and monitoring of infrastructure and disaster management, as well as data capturing and management in data scarce countries. Intra-African partnerships such as these allow for building trust with member states and understand different dynamics related to data sharing. In addition, they are an efficient means of technology transfer between African countries and from well-established international institutions. Strategic partnerships in capacity building with JICA/JAXA, AUDA-NEPAD and participation in the CEOS WGCaPD and TIGER programs allowed the various regional, national, provincial and local governments, private companies, and academic institution in Africa to gain skills useful for advancing regional and national priorities in various thematic areas such as agriculture, disaster management, integrated water resources management, land management and conservation, as well as policy-making and implementation. Furthermore, capacity building models such as Training of the Trainers (ToTs) ensure that participants from various African countries continue to transfer knowledge and skills to their colleagues, as well as students studying towards degrees at historically disadvantaged universities. In addition, SANSA scientists continue to transfer their knowledge and skills through the provision of short training courses to industry professionals, students and university lecturers. As a result, of the quality of the courses, there is an increasing demand for training courses from across all spheres of government, universities, public entities and the private sector. Therefore, strategic partnerships allow for the transfer and exchange of knowledge and skills and are a clear contribution towards advancing diverse national priorities, realizing AU-Agenda 2063 aspirations and achieving UN-SDGs. For example, officials from Statistics South Africa (STATSA), an organization responsible for reporting on progress towards UN-SDGs, use knowledge and skills to improve reporting and instigate monitoring activities based on EO. Similarly, private companies such as GeoTerra Image and Southern Mapping that participated in these capacity building activities can develop innovative down-stream commercial applications stimulated by the capacity building activities, to support national government initiatives such as the  
Figure 8: Participants of the TIGER training workshop in Pretoria, South Africa held from 7-11 September 2015. The participants consisted of 30 water management professionals from 10 African countries, viz.