The objectives of the FAO-AFRICOVER project are to establish a digital georeferenced database on land-cover, and a geographic referential (geodesy, toponymy, roads, hydrography) at a 1:250,000 / 1:200,000 scale, for the whole Africa. This base will also be generalized at the 1:1,000,000 scale. A further objective of AFRICOVER is to reinforce and to build up the national and sub-regional capacities for the establishment, update, and operational use of the geographic referential and the geodatabases. 

Fig. 9  
The East-African sub-region has initiated the implementation of the AFRICOVER project. FAO assists the WorldBank in the technical preparation of the REIMP in the Central Africa sub region. The REIMP will include the AFRICOVER products. In Central Africa, the AFRICOVER team is also conducting pilot studies on the use of RADAR data (RADARSAT) for vegetation mapping. 

Finally, FAO has assigned the preparation of the technical specifications of the project, for land cover classification, geometry and topography, and technical methods, to three international working groups. The first group has already defined a hierarchical AFRICOVER land cover classification. The second group, working on geometry, has defined the norms in terms of datum, spheroid, mapping projection, mapping grid, planimetric and altimetric accuracy for the whole continent. The third group, working on technical methods will be in charge of supervising pilot projects that will validate the AFRICOVER specifications. 

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