Volta Basin Authority

The 1st Assembly of the Heads of State of the riparian countries of the Volta Basin, which was held on 19 January 2007 under the auspices of the Government of Burkina Faso in Ouagadougou, signed a Convention for the establishment of the Volta Basin Authority (VBA).

The Volta is a transboundary river, which is shared by six countries in West Africa; Benin, Burkina Faso, Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana, Mali and Togo. It stretches from north to south over a distance of 1850 km with a basin covering an area of approximately 400,000 km².

The Member States of the Volta Basin Authority are supporting the Volta Basin Observatory so as to serve as an information, communication and a decision making tool. The Observatory will support the sustainable use of water and related resources and protect and even regenerate degraded ecosystems in the basin.

Since the Volta Basin Authority is a quite young institution, the operative business regarding monitoring of water management related issues is still in the implementation phase. Therefore TIGER-NET provides a critical capacity in terms of EO data processing and future applications.

Based on VBA’s mandate, reporting obligations, regulation and current practices, the highest requirement for geo-information needs are in

• improvement of the knowledge on water resources in terms of both quantity and quality of the Volta basin.
• the capacity to monitor how changes in the environment (land cover/use change, land degradation such as forestry) affect quantity and quality of water resources

TIGER-NET provides the possibility to monitor and analyse EO data on the quantity and quality of water resources, as well as factors affecting these, supported by in situ measurements being carried out in the countries. Data generation from EO data is timely and cost effective compared to the traditional methods of data collection and analyses.