Due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic crisis, the Sixth Session of the Regional Committee of the United Nations Global Geospatial Information Management in Africa (UN-GGIM Africa) was held online from 1 to 4 December 2020. The meeting started with opening remarks from the Chair of UN-GGIM Africa, the Director of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), and the UN-GGIM Secretariat. The agenda included reports from the working groups of UN-GGIM Africa, presentations on NSDI, integration of geospatial and statistics, the Integrated Geospatial Information Framework (IGIF), technical issues, new trends, special topics and a webinar on benefits of investments in Geospatial Information and communicating with Decision Makers.

Invited by the Chair of UN-GGIM Africa and its Secretariat in ECA, the SALB programme was presented briefly (here in English and French) during the proceedings and included an update on the latest status and progress over the African continent. The presentation highlighted the importance of common geographies as a mean to monitor the Sustainable Development Goals. Administrative units, as collected in the context of the SALB programme, are critical for the aggregation and dissemination of statistical data to measure the Sustainable Development Goals of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. A strong engagement and collaboration from National geospatial offices is key to making these common geographies more widely available over Africa.

The event also provided an opportunity for the SALB programme to inform participants of its new partnership with the Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN), GRID3 and a coalition of other partners in the context of an award to progress the availability of administrative units data over the African continent. As such, the SALB programme is further enhanced to facilitate both the accessibility to data from countries, as well as supportcountries to prepare their data in this context, if they wish to do so. More data from African countries is forthcoming in 2021.