Description :
International Financial Institutions (IFI), such as the World Bank (WB) and Regional Development Banks like the Asian Development Bank (ADB), have the institutional mandate to provide and catalyze investments fostering sustainable development and are providing financial means accompanied by technical assistance to help countries achieve their national development priorities. Earth Observation is increasingly being recognized as a viable source of information in IFI operations, ranging from planning and design of projects to implementation and monitoring and impact evaluation of development assistance. ESA has partnered for more than a decade with IFIs to demonstrate value and impact of EO services and provide a basis for take-up and scale-up.
IFIs are now stepping up their efforts on mainstreaming EO services to an operational level. Facilitated through ESA’s strategic Global Development Assistance (GDA) partnership program, cooperation efforts have advanced under the joint Space for International Development Assistance initiative with both WB and ADB putting in place complementary programmatic structures.
This agora will highlight impact stories resulting from first GDA program activities and discuss with partner IFIs on how they take ownership in integrating those EO services to inform their operations. Building on lessons learnt, an outlook will be provided on required steps to further foster wide-scale absorption and integration at the client country level, in order to maximize socio-economic impact and stimulate growth of local digital economies.

Speakers:
• Tomas Abell (Asian Development Bank ADB)
• Edward Anderson (World Bank WB)
• Athur Mabiso (International Fund for Agricultural DevelopmentIFAD)
• Emmanuel Pajot (European Association of Remote Sensing Companies EARSC)
• Golala Ruhani (Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA)

Moderator:
• Christoph Aubrecht (ESA)