Africa’s satellite ambitions are expanding, with more countries launching satellites or developing national spacecraft while building the infrastructure around them.
At the same time, governments and their international partners are putting greater emphasis on engineers, researchers and students, addressing a persistent gap in Africa’s push to build greater technical autonomy in space.
Africa has launched 69 satellites across 18 countries to date, according to SpaceHubs Africa’s August 6, 2026 tally. The figure has risen from 58 satellites across 15 countries in 2023, as national programmes expand in earth observation, communications and technology demonstration.
The momentum continues. On August 3, Libya’s Libyan Authority for Scientific Research discussed plans for its first national satellite, a CubeSat intended to monitor climate change and desertification. The project follows a 2023 collaboration to develop a Libyan CubeSat, although its funding, international partners and launch date have yet to be announced.
For years, however, owning a satellite has not necessarily meant having the capacity to build one.
A 2023 United States Institute of Peace assessment found that only 19 of 58 African satellites had been manufactured locally, while 39 were manufactured by foreign institutions. The locally manufactured category included projects involving international collaboration at African institutions.
About two-thirds of the satellites in that assessment were therefore manufactured outside Africa.
The pattern extends beyond spacecraft manufacturing. A study published in Perspectives of Earth and Space Scientists found that 90% of African Earth-observation projects in its sample were led by non-African organisations, while only 35% of active satellites serving African organisations had been contracted locally.
The researchers said reliance on external organisations could constrain the development of local expertise and facilities.
New programmes are beginning to tackle that gap by linking satellite development to local skills.
Rwanda offers one of the clearest recent examples. Czech satellite manufacturer TRL Space has established a cleanroom and local engineering team in Kigali, where it is developing TROLL NG, Rwanda’s first registered commercial satellite, for a planned launch in the second half of 2027.
The company says Rwandan engineers have worked on the project for four years, with local teams now involved in subsystem work and analysis. It is also building an airborne and drone-based data programme ahead of the satellite’s launch, while positioning the Kigali facility as a potential regional assembly, integration and testing hub.
The ambition is also becoming regional. In April, Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda and South Sudan agreed to study a jointly owned communications and broadcasting satellite, with the governments linking the proposal to stronger regional infrastructure and reduced dependence on external systems.
The project is still at feasibility stage, but it shows how space ambitions are widening from individual national satellites to shared regional capability.
The training programmes supporting these ambitions are also becoming more specialised.
Through the Africa-EU Space Partnership Programme, the European Space Agency and African Space Agency are putting African engineers and scientists into spacecraft systems training. In 2026, 15 African master’s and PhD students were selected for ESA’s Earth Observation Satellite Systems Design Training, covering satellite architecture, payloads, ground systems, operations, verification and testing.
A separate ESA workshop running from August 31 to September 4 is training young African engineers in spacecraft testing and mission engineering.
The wider partnership is backed by €100 million, with €45 million already committed, according to the European Union, for cooperation on space technologies, services, applications and institutional capacity.
The private sector is also beginning to build similar pathways.
Cameroon-based Nanosatellite Missions Design has trained more than 200 African professionals and is developing Mission 237 as a practical training constellation. Its model gives engineers access to real spacecraft, telemetry, telecommands and mission data rather than relying only on classroom simulations.
The company won the 2026 NewSpace Africa Conference Startup Pitch Competition in Libreville, putting the skills question alongside the growing commercial space sector.
According to experts the challenge has conventionally not simply been a lack of graduates.
Johnmark Ochieng, an innovation advisory partner at RIIS working across Africa’s complex sectors, argues that African universities already produce astrophysicists, geospatial engineers and remote-sensing specialists.
The bigger question, he said, is what happens after they graduate.
“More often than not you’d either find that they sort of look for opportunities abroad,” Ochieng said, pointing to the brain drain that takes technical skills out of African markets.
The result is a gap between training and industry. A country can produce technically qualified graduates without having enough companies, laboratories, research programmes or funded projects to absorb them.
Ochieng also identifies access to capital as a major constraint for graduates and researchers trying to turn technical expertise into businesses or applied research.
“There are so many astrophysics graduates. There are so many geospatial engineers. There are so many remote sensing experts,” he said. “Someone might have an idea, they might want to have a startup, but then they wouldn’t know where to go to get this funding.”
That is pushing more programmes towards practical projects, competitions and commercial opportunities.
At the student level, the pipeline is already showing signs of depth.
In August, seven South African high school learners competed at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in the International Space Settlement Design Competition, representing South Africa in its first entry into the international competition.
They were the only African participants in the finals and joined students from the UK, Australia, Brazil, China and the US as part of Team Rockdonnell, which won the competition. Their proposal, Hermes, was a spacecraft designed to transport 3,000 people across the inner Solar System.
The South African team had qualified through the inaugural South Africa Space Design Competition, which brought together 109 students from nine schools.
One of the participants, Joseph Allderman of Westerford High School, won the Anita Gale Creative Genius Prize, one of four individual awards presented at the competition.
“Team ZA worked so cohesively together that we all deserved this award. I was just the one who got picked to represent it,” Allderman said.
For Jagger Cooper-Doubell, chair and executive director of the South Africa Space Design Competition, the result showed what access to opportunity could unlock.
“The talent was never missing in South Africa. The opportunity was,” he said.
Kenya offered another example a few days later. On August 5, students in Nairobi spoke directly with European Space Agency astronaut Sophie Adenot aboard the International Space Station through Amateur Radio on the International Space Station programme.
Kenya was the only African country selected for the 2026 ARISS cycle, according to the Kenya Space Agency.
Boeing and the Future African Space Explorers STEM Academy have also expanded their Pathways to Space programme to Ethiopia, Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa, targeting more than 2,000 students and introducing them to aerospace engineering, spacecraft design, mission control, launch operations and space research.
These programmes are emerging as the economic case for technical capacity grows.
Space in Africa estimates that the continent’s space economy was worth US$24.95 billion in 2024 and could reach US$39.52 billion by 2030.
