Planning and monitoring infrastructure, from space and on one map

Suppose you are responsible for a large infrastructure programme: a road corridor, a national electrification effort, a grid extension. Resources are limited and not every project can be built. Two questions follow you through: which investments turn the available budget into the most impact, and how to track construction across remote areas when ground reports arrive late and in different formats. Most organisations answer both with consultants and reports. There is a better way.

Take roads. This year, the World Bank and the African Development Bank committed hundreds of millions of dollars to corridors from the Horn of Africa to the West African coast, several of them crossing remote and partly insecure areas where these questions apply in full.

Here is how we, at VIDA, answer both:

️Planning and selection. For a West African corridor programme, we recently built the economic case for several road sections and ranked them by trade and economic impact potential. Our team assembled the data: settlements and population, crops, livestock and mining, road condition, security, and more, into a VIDA workspace. It shows what each section connects: people, agriculture, mines, markets, other roads, harbours, etc. And because VIDA is a working, AI-powered tool rather than a report, you can compare options within your budget and adjust priorities on the fly, including in
the room with decision-makers, where alignment usually takes longest.

️Tracking construction. We use satellite imagery to detect paving progress over time and combine it with field reports and photos on the same map. We piloted this across three regions in West Africa. The result is one programme-
wide view: what has been built and what is delayed. Teams can then go where the map says something is wrong, rather than everywhere.

The same VIDA platform runs planning and live monitoring for electrification programmes, grid lines and other infrastructure in over 70 countries. If this sounds useful for a programme you are planning, implementing or monitoring, we would be happy to show a live demo.