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The successful implementation of the African Union's Agenda 2063 strategic development blueprint is critical for the attainment of economic development, social prosperity, political stability, protection, and regional integration in Africa. Agenda 2063 is a strategic and endogenous development plan that seeks to strategically and competitively reposition the African continent to ensure poverty eradication and equitable people-centric socio-economic and technological transformation. Its impact areas include wealth creation, shared prosperity, sustainable environment, and transformative capacities. Monitoring and evaluation systems play a critical role in collecting, recording, storing, integrating, and evaluating and tracking performance information in the implementation of longer-term strategic plans. The usage of the geographic information system (GIS) as a monitoring and evaluation tool has gained traction in the last few decades due to its ability to support the collection, integration, storage, analysis, output, and distribution of location-based data. The advent of web-based GIS provides a powerful online platform to collect, integrate, discover, use and share geospatial data, information, and services related to sustainable development. In this paper, we aim to describe the implementation, architectural structural design, and the functionality of the pilot Agenda 2063 geoportal. The live prototype internet-based geoportal is intended to facilitate data collection, management, integration, analysis, and visualization of Agenda 2063 development indicators. This geoportal is meant to support the planning, implementation, and monitoring of the Agenda 2063 goals at the continental, regional, and national levels. As our results show, we successfully demonstrated that a web-geoportal is a powerful interactive platform to upload, access, explore, visualize, analyse, and disseminate geospatial data related to the sustainable development of the African continent. Although in the pilot phase, the geoportal demonstrates the primary functionality of geoportals in terms of its capability to discover, analyse, share, and download geospatial datasets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AU-Agenda 2063 was adopted at the 24th Ordinary Session of the African Heads of State and Government in 2015 as the blueprint for the future development of the continent. Built upon the continent's past experiences, challenges, and successes, AU-Agenda 2063 comprehensively describes the strategic path for Africa's future development in the next 50 years. Thus, the monitoring of its implementation in various African states is critical for ensuring sustainable development and track progress. However, the higher cost of collecting data for accurately and reliably monitoring the implementation of Agenda 2063 may hinder the progress towards achieving these goals. Satellite Earth observation provides ample data, and thus has provided opportunities for the development of novel products and services with the potential to support implementation, monitoring and reporting for AU-Agenda 2063 development imperatives. However, it has been limitedly exploited in Africa, as evidenced by lower research outputs and investments. This calls for increased capacity building in the use of available EO data and products for various users including decision makers to advance national, regional and continental priorities. The use of such data products is often hampered by the capability to understand the products and thus their value for addressing socio-economic challenges. This paper discusses the potential of Earth observation capacity building for supporting the implementation, monitoring of, and reporting towards achieving AU-Agenda 2063 development imperatives. Specifically, this paper identifies existing capacity building resources, including the role of open and free Earth observation data, open-source software, and product dissemination platforms that can be leveraged for supporting national development, service delivery and the achievement of AU-Agenda 2063 targets. Furthermore, the paper recognizes the importance of bilateral and multilateral partnerships in leveraging existing know-how, technology and other resources for advancing strategic goals of African emerging space agencies and promoting sustainable development, with examples from South African National Space Agency (SANSA). Then, the challenges and opportunities for capacity building and the wide adoption of EO in Africa are discussed in the context of AU-Agenda 2063. The paper thus concludes that EO capacity building is essential to address the skills and data gaps and increase the use of EO-based solutions for decision making in various sectors, critical for achieving AU-A2063. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]