GDA at EO CAFÉ: Opportunities for European services industry to access Development Finance

On Thursday 13 October 2022, the GDA programme team participated in EARSC’s EOcafe on the subject of “Access to development finance for the Earth Observation (EO) downstream sector”. The online event was a great success with the participation of over 100 people.

Alex Chunet, ESA representative at the World Bank (WB) and Paolo Manunta, ESA representative at the Asian Development Bank (ADB), gave insights into International Financial Institutions (IFIs)’s operations and spoke about the IFI’s financing instruments and procurement processes. This included offering EO service providers with practical guidance and advice on developing products and services for development operations and entry points to working on these IFI-financed projects.

Sharon Gomez from GAF together with Mauro Arcorace from Terradue, shared their experiences of working with IFIs through the GDA programme and its precursor, the Earth Observation for Sustainable Development initiative (EO4SD), and explained how it helped them to pursue new commercial opportunities.

“ESA’s programmes represent a good opportunity to interact with the Banks, to get to know their programmes and to raise our visibility with them”.

Sharom Gomez, GAF

At a time when demand for EO services is growing rapidly within these development finance institutions, ESA is keen to understand the current positioning of European industry with those organisations. A survey is currently being circulated in order to better understand the experiences of the European and Canadian EO service providers and can be found here.

The replay of this EO Café is available here. A follow-up webinar organised specifically with IFIs procurement specialists will be organised by Caribou Space and Imperative Space towards the end of 2022.