As the leader in satellite IoT, Lacuna’s team took centre stage at the recent NewSpace Africa Conference, working with governmental institutes, Space Agencies and Academia to progress Africa’s digital transformation challenges.
The level of capacity building in Africa’s space industry is truly impressive with over 120 governmental institutes in attendance, including 20 national Space Agencies coming together to work on collaborative initiatives, explore markets, and set policy.
Africa’s topology naturally suits satellite connectivity with vast expanses of territory not yet served by terrestrial communications, and so falling behind on the benefits of digitalisation and information sharing. For Lacuna, the key take-aways were projects in precision agriculture, conservation, remote infrastructure monitoring and asset tracking.
The event was hosted at the newly opened African Space Agency facility, co-located with the Egyptian Space Agency in New Cairo, a location which gave a stark insight in to the level of regeneration and investment within the continent. With a booming African population, New Cairo highlight Africa’s commitment to invest, building an entire new city and administrative capital 30km across from ‘Old’ Cairo. The scale of the civil engineering and mass building was impressive to behold, and while this new city will no doubt be supremely well connected, there are many applications for low-power IoT during the construction phase, for example quantity surveying and tracking of cable drums and other valuable assets (see picture above).
Lacuna’s key focus for the event was to meeting national regulators and address the fragmented regulatory landscape that exists within the continent – a significant headwind, but also an opportunity for Lacuna to expand the market by applying our NewSpace philosophies.