Somalia has the longest coastline in mainland Africa. Most of it is unobserved.
Roughly three thousand kilometres of it, with fisheries worth defending, traffic worth tracking and very little infrastructure looking at either. Two things change that: a communications path that reaches vessels, and an observation capability that does not need one.
Four questions the sea keeps asking
Maritime domain awareness is usually sold as a single platform. In practice it is four separate problems, and the honest answer is that they need different instruments.
What is in our waters?
Vessels that broadcast their position are the easy half. The ones that matter often do not — transponders get switched off precisely when somebody would want to look. Satellite imagery and radar detection see hulls rather than signals, which is why observation and tracking are not the same capability.
Earth observation →- Detection of vessels not broadcasting a position
- Change over time, rather than a single snapshot
- Evidence in a form that supports a licensing decision
Can we reach the vessel?
Fishing fleets, patrol craft and commercial traffic all need a link that works well past the last terrestrial cell. Our teleport is in Mogadishu rather than another country, so the path from a vessel to shore does not cross a continent before it becomes useful.
Satellite communications →- Maritime VSAT on C- and Ku-band
- Voice and data for operations and reporting
- Terminals sized for the vessel rather than the brochure
Is the coast changing?
Erosion, port silting, mangrove loss and illegal shoreline development are slow problems that become expensive ones. They are visible from orbit long before they are visible from a boat, and they are measurable over a series rather than argued about.
Coastal & environmental change →- Shoreline movement over multi-year series
- Port and approach-channel monitoring
- Habitat and mangrove extent
Who is accountable when it stops?
The reason we can take this work on is that the satellite hub, the landing station and the data centre are on the same compound under one team. For an agency operating at sea, the number of companies involved in a failure is not an administrative detail.
The infrastructure →- One operator across space and ground segment
- Operations centre staffed in Mogadishu
- In-country hosting for the data that comes back
We would rather tell you what this is not
Maritime domain awareness is frequently sold as a finished national system. What we operate is the ground segment, the communications and the analysis capability that such a system runs on — delivered from inside the country rather than from a foreign hub.
Where a programme needs sensors, patrol assets or legal enforcement machinery, those come from elsewhere, and we will say so at the first meeting rather than the third.
Tell us the stretch of water you are responsible for
Give us the area, the question you need answered and how often you need answering. We will come back with what can be observed, what can be reached, and what would need something we do not operate.