# The Status of Space Weather Infrastructure and Research in Africa
## 2 Distribution of Space Weather Infrastructure in Africa
### Data Access and Reliability  
Most of the data generated by the observing equipment have a free access policy, except for those owned by national mapping agencies in various countries. However, different data providers have imposed conditions to be met before granting access to the data. In most cases, if the data is purely for research, and not for commercial use, then free access is always granted, but some acknowledgement of the data source is required whenever a publication is produced with them. The SANDIMS data portal at SANSA [45] provides free access, via a data request for research applications, to all geomagnetic, ionospheric, and magnetospheric data gathered from SANSA Space Science's instrumentation network. The eSWua web portal of Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia (INGV) in Italy [46] provides free access to visualization and downloads of the data from instruments managed by INGV. The users can access data from a GUI or a service from which massive data downloading can be performed automatically.  
This open data policy has enabled many African researchers to benefit from space weather data generated by equipment hosted in the continent and beyond. In effect, this has contributed immensely to human capital development in space weather science in many countries in Africa. However, a major setback is the non-operational status of most of the equipment due to several factors such as non-stable electric power supply, poor internet connectivity, poor system configuration, poor maintenance, and equipment operating beyond its useful lifetime. Replacement of ageing equipment and maintenance issues are made worse by the fact that some African equipment hosts do not actually use the data for any training or research and hence have no interest in maintaining or replacing the equipment. Although some of the factors limiting successful equipment functioning could be addressed by the hosts (e.g., unreliable electric power by investing in solar power), most of the equipment hosts do not have funding for this, and most of the host institutions do not provide support towards that end.  
The lack of a good network of space weather monitors in Africa is limiting the modelling of the African sector of the near-earth space environment and thus the development of space weather products and services. For example, it is known that scintillation threatens the performances of GNSS-reliant services requiring high-precision positioning, but forecasting scintillation is still a challenge. The development of ionospheric climatology over various geographic regions of Africa would be a useful step in providing space weather information. Climatology is only possible with a proper network of space weather monitors that continuously provide data over an extended period.  
\begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c c} \hline
**Countries** & **AWESOME** & **VHF** & **SID** \\ \hline Algeria & 1 & 0 & 2 \\ Burkina Faso & 0 & 0 & 1 \\ Congo Brazzaville & 0 & 0 & 6 \\ Ivory Coast & 0 & 2 & 2 \\ Egypt & 1 & 2 & 14 \\ Ethiopia & 1 & 2 & 14 \\ Kenya & 0 & 2 & 3 \\ Libya & 2 & 0 & 1 \\ Morocco & 1 & 0 & 0 \\ Namibia & 0 & 0 & 1 \\ Nigeria & 0 & 2 & 38 \\ Senegal & 0 & 0 & 1 \\ South Africa & 0 & 2 & 13 \\ Tunisia & 1 & 0 & 9 \\ Uganda & 0 & 2 & 4 \\ Zambia & 0 & 0 & 2 \\ \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table}
Table 8: The number of VLF and VHF receivers installed.