As part of its commitment to young professionals and to support universities, Hexagon’s Safety, Infrastructure & Geospatial division participated in the Vrije Universiteit Brussels (VUB) Trade Mission to Senegal.
VUB has been organizing the Trade Mission for more than 50 years. The school gathers students and companies like Hexagon that are eager to explore new markets and forge fruitful partnerships.
Every year, approximately 30 students from diverse academic backgrounds, from business engineers to bio engineers to communication sciences to law students, embark on this mission as part of their theses or practical coursework. This year’s mission was in collaboration with Flanders Investment and Trade, with the aim to unlock the potential of Senegal’s and India’s vibrant markets.
My name is Ilke Seynaeve, and I recently graduated as a business engineer from VUB. The Trade Mission served as the cornerstone of my thesis. From the start of the project, I had the opportunity to collaborate with Begoña Verdejo Herreras from Hexagon’s Safety, Infrastructure & Geospatial division.
The focus of this year’s project was government industries including infrastructure, transport and the environment. In February, the research phase started. My primary goals were to identify geospatial government projects in Senegal that Hexagon could work on and to establish connections with government contacts and engineering companies in the region.
The Hexagon products I connected to the government industries were GeoMedia, ERDAS IMAGINE, HxGN Smart Census and M.App Enterprise. These products are for cloud-based platforms and help data management for the creation, management, visualization and analysis of geographic data and give a better understanding of the physical world and insights on natural resources and infrastructure.
Overall, the project found nine potential projects, 18 government contracts and connections and 100 ecosystem organizations that could help with Senegal’s problems with climate change weather events, infrastructure causing accidents and limited transport options.
