## 5 Strategic Partnerships for Capacity Building: Relevance for AU-Agenda 2063  
The need for partnerships has been identified as one of the priorities to achieve AU-Agenda 2063 goal 19 (Africa as a major partner in global affairs and peaceful co-existence) and concurrently UN-SDG 17 (Strengthen the means of implementation and revitalize the global partnership for sustainable development). This is also enshrined in the African Space Policy, and SANSA's strategic goals, i.e., to foster international cooperation (including with other African countries) in space-related activities. As a result, several partnerships to collaborate on various space-related activities, including capacity building, with both national (including institutions of higher learning), African (such as the Southern African Science Service Centre for Climate Change and Adaptive Land Management (SASSCAL), the Regional Centre for Mapping Resource for Development (RCMRD), and the SADC-Climate Service Centre) and international organizations (such as JRC, the UK Space Agency, JICA/JAXA and DLR) have been forged. In addition, SANSA is an active member of the Group on Earth Observations (GEO), Committee on Earth Observation Satellites (CEOS), and through the South African Earth Observation Strategy (SAEOS) participates in the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS). These partnerships have resulted in several collaborative capacity building projects focusing on South Africa, the SADC region and, occasionally, the rest of Africa. For example, a bilateral technical cooperation with the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) and the Japanese Space Agency (JAXA) aimed at strengthening SAR remote sensing capability (including exploitation of ALOS-2 data) among South African Earth observation professionals in academia, the private sector and government, resulted in six (6) face-to-face training courses [89] held in South Africa and Japan. These training workshops provided both theoretical and practical skills in optical and SAR remote sensing, covering topics such as land cover classification, geohazard mapping, maritime, agriculture and change detection applications for land deformation/subsidence (e.g., Sinkhole) assessment using SAR Interferometry techniques. In addition, the participation in CEOS Working Group on Capacity Building and Data Democracy (WGCapD) [90] has brought several benefits for various regions in Africa, allowing knowledge sharing and collaboration between African organizations and other major international organizations such as NASA, USGS, INPE, ISRO, the European Space Agency (ESA), the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA), and the German Aerospace Center (DLR), among others. In the last decade, several international capacity building programs to advance human capital development on the African continent have been successfully delivered. One such program is the TIGER initiative, an international partnership program endorsed by the African Ministers' Council on Water (AMCOW), which was launched in 2002 as a response to a call of the World Summit on Sustainable Development held in Johannesburg, South Africa, in September 2002. It was launched as an urgent intervention to assist African countries in mitigating the challenges related to data acquisition, analysis and distribution of water-related Geo-information through the utilization of Earth observation data (i.e., both optical and SAR) [91]. Capacity building was considered an instrumental contribution in augmenting institutional, human and technical capacity necessary to exploit earth observation technology to support effective water resources management. As part of the TIGER program, a FOSS plugin for QGIS software, i.e., the Water Observation Information System (WOIS), was developed as part of the output [92].