This was a really exciting month on the project! Firstly, the project itself was formally launched, alongside this website, at the start of October during World Space Week.

We have spent most of the month discussing the project with over sixty stakeholders from a number of different counties in Kenya, and a number of local and national Government bodies. Due to COVID this has been a 99% virtual engagement, with just one or two face-to-face meeting in Kenya. We’ve found the virtual approach to be a positive experience. It offered better engagement than large in-person workshops as smaller groups improved interaction between everyone on the calls.

We’ve learnt a huge amount of information about sand mining in Kenya, some things we expected to hear about and some things we didn’t know before the conversation. Overall, this has been an excellent start to our user engagement strategy with lots of valuable insights.

From these engagements we’ve developed a number of example user journeys and their requirements, and we’ve started to develop example satellite products that could support these journeys. Finally, we’ve also produced an analysis of the current position within Kenya for sustainable sand mining based on literature reviews and the stakeholder engagements.

It’s been a great start to the project!