Dar Ramani Huria (Swahili for “Dar Open Map”) is a community-based mapping project in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania. This project is training teams of local university students and community members from throughout Dar Es Salaam to use OpenStreetMap to create sophisticated and highly accurate maps of Dar es Salaam.
Every year during the rainy season, Dar suffers from devastating floods that wipe out roads, take out houses, and result in many deaths and millions of dollars worth of damages. The damage these floods cause could be prevented with adequate planning, but much of the city is made up of unplanned and informal settlements. That’s where the mapping comes in! By helping communities to map residential areas, roads, streams, floodplains, and other relevant features, the project will bring disaster prevention and response to areas that were previously off the map, literally. The project will also bring awareness of the need for flood prevention and risk reduction to the local level while teaching participants valuable computer and mapping skills that they can put to use elsewhere.
When the maps are finished, they will be combined with other data in InaSAFE, a free software that enables users to run realistic natural disaster scenarios for better planning and response. As an added benefit, these maps will be publicly available online, available for download on this website, and also delivered in printed form to the local governing bodies of each ward.
Dar Ramani Huria activities form part of the Tanzania Urban Resilience Programme, a partnership between the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development (DFID) and the World Bank established to support the GoT in its endeavour to increase resilience to climate and disaster risk. The project is supported by the World Bank’s Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery and implementation is guided by the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team.
