Co-creating Digital Water Solutions: Transitioning from training to Community-Driven Earth Observation Use Cases in Data-Scarce Africa

Across Africa, water systems are undergoing rapid transformation in response to climate variability, land-use changes, and increasing demand. Yet, water management decisions remain constrained by limited in-situ data. While advances in digital innovation offer substantial potential to address water data scarcity, weak institutional capacity limits the use of such innovations by African water institutions. This work presents insights from the International Water Management Institute (IWMI)’s Digital Innovations for Water-Secure Africa (DIWASA) initiative, which adopts a community use-case-based co-creation approach to translate Earth Observation (EO) data into actionable digital water solutions that are locally relevant and institutionally embedded.
Guided by principles of co-creating water knowledge, teams of practitioner communities in Ethiopia, Ghana, and Zambia identified priority water challenges and co-developed context-specific use cases grounded in local decision contexts. Through inclusive, iterative engagement with 50 African organisations, diverse knowledge systems were integrated with Earth observation data from Digital Earth Africa (DEA) to generate legitimate and actionable water solutions. To sustain the application, targeted capacity-building training was provided for the participants, who have now been utilising these skills for over a year.  In Ghana, Burkina Faso, Zambia, and Ethiopia. We document the co-creation of ten priority community use cases, including (i) satellite-based (i) soil moisture estimation to support irrigation scheduling at the Bontanga Irrigation Scheme in Ghana; (ii) coastal erosion monitoring to evaluate the effectiveness of sea-defence interventions along Ghana’s eastern coastline; (iii) flood damage assessment to enable rapid humanitarian response in flood-prone rural areas of Burkina Faso; (iv) assessment of agricultural drought in Chongwe District of Zambia; (v) crop yield monitoring in Chibombo District of Zambia; and (vi) soil salinity monitoring in a large-scale irrigation scheme in Ethiopia. 
IWMI’s role through DIWASA was primarily facilitative, providing technical backstopping, convening spaces, and capacity development, while ownership remained with national institutions and early-career professionals. Validation was undertaken through field engagement and multi-stakeholder workshops involving public water authorities, meteorological agencies, research institutions, the private sector, and local users. Results demonstrate that co-created Earth observation (EO) workflows can effectively address critical information gaps across multiple domains, including soil moisture dynamics, shoreline change, flood extent and impacts, rainfall-driven agricultural drought dynamics, field-scale maize yield performance, and soil salinity monitoring. Importantly, these workflows also contribute to strengthening institutional capacity, enhancing data literacy, and improving cross-agency coordination for evidence-based decision-making.  
We argue that the value of EO for water security lies not only in technical performance but in how knowledge is transferred and transitioned from learning to action,  and co-created, governed, and integrated into decision-making systems. The DIWASA experience demonstrates scalable pathways for advancing EO-based water services through community-driven innovation and sustained capacity building in Africa.