One woman’s battle to push Africa’s space race

Cameroonian scientist Marie Makuate has been at the forefront of using information harvested by satellites to help save the lives of people on Earth in emergencies, but she argues the expense of the data should spur more African countries to launch their own space hardware.

In the hours after the deadly earthquake struck central Morocco last September, the 32-year-old's phone started buzzing.

She was thousands of kilometres from the zone of destruction, but her skills analysing satellite images were vital.

"I woke up hearing message notifications of my colleagues telling me that there had been a disaster in Morocco," Ms Makuate tells the BBC from her base in the Cameroonian capital, Yaoundé.

As a geospatial expert for the NGO Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team, she creates maps to help emergency services navigate an unpredictable territory so that people in need can be reached quickly.

It is a job that Ms Makuate says gives her purpose and motivation.

"I was shocked to hear about the [Morocco] disaster, but then I thought that if I mapped as much infrastructure as possible, it would help other people save lives."

Last September, her maps, derived from open-source, freely available images, became a lifeline for organisations like Médecins Sans Frontières operating in the devastated towns, which included Marrakesh.

A map of the kind that Ms Makuate creates looks very different from the ones that most might be familiar with.

It shows an updated, high-definition view of the territory to which she and the team she leads add potentially life-saving information.

"The most important thing emergency services need to know when there is a disaster is: 'Where is the road? where is the water? where's a river or a [shopping] mall":[]}