Equipping University Students with Digital Geospatial Skills– More than 10,000 Flood Data Points Mapped in Eight Weeks

Photo: Chris Morgan, World Bank Training and working with university students has been a core part of the Ramani Huria project since it started in 2015. Since then, we have trained over 1,000 university students in industrial placements, equipping them with the valuable open geospatial skills they can use in their careers. While training students, we have also been able to collect a variety of datasets to support urban resilience programs, particularly flood preparedness in Dar es Salaam. Over these past five years, we have improved our skills-sharing with students. This not only…Read more

Community Data for Improved Disaster Management and Urban Planning – Mwanza, Tanzania

Photo: Primoz Kovacic, Spatial Collective Community generated data has proven to be the most reliable information that reflects the community’s situation and the challenges they face. Working with community members to collect data in their own neighborhood increases data reliability, validity and its ultimate use as the community believes in the data and has a sense of ownership. Spatial Collective, Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team, and OpenMap Development Tanzania spent the last five months expanding its community mapping initiatives to Mwanza City. Working with 79 students from the Institute of Rural Development Planning (IRDP) and…Read more

Spatial Collective, Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team, and OpenMap Development Tanzania extend their engagement to Mwanza 

Community Mapping for Urban Risk in Mwanza, Tanzania Photo: Primoz Kovacic Mwanza is the second-largest city in Tanzania with a population of about 1.2 million. Located on the shores of Lake Victoria, it is characterized by highly dissected steep slopes, rock hills, narrow interfluves, and river valleys.  Like other towns in Tanzania, Mwanza has undergone a massive spatial expansion in recent years.  According to Macrotrends, the population in Mwanza increased by 5.56 percent since 2019, with a lot of its growth concentrated in unplanned areas. Further, approximately 81 percent of households situated in…Read more

Resilience Academy supports 200 University Students to Gain Geospatial Digital Skills

Since 2019, the Resilience Academy has been supporting students’ industrial training—an internship program that normally goes up to eight weeks. The aim is to support students participating in practical activities and increase their skills especially digital skills. Resilience Academy is a partnership between four academic institutions in Tanzania: Ardhi University (ARU), University of Dar es Salaam (UDSM), Sokoine University of Agriculture (SUA), and State University of Zanzibar (SUZA) with the University of Turku (UTU) from Finland. The skills that students will acquire include mobile data collection using OpenData Kit (ODK)—an open-source software for…Read more

Ramani Huria Now Under Tanzania Resilience Academy

On 29th July 2019, the Ramani Huria (RH) summer industrial training project entered a new era of management and administration, shifting from the direct management by the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) to being managed by universities, i.e. University of Dar es Salaam (UDSM), Ardhi University (ARU) and the State University of Zanzibar (SUZA) as the Tanzania Resilience Academy (RA). The RA has established cooperation between Tanzanian universities and the University of Turku in Finland together with national and international actors interested in working on urban resilience and flooding issues. Through the RA, multiple…Read more

What Waste Management Taught us about Data.

Data for Waste Management: A Comparison between Formal and Informal Settlements in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. For the last 4 years, Ramani Huria – a project based in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, led by Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) and supported by the World Bank – have mapped the drains,  rivers, and other infrastructures across Dar es Salaam, to provide information for flood management. By mapping the city’s most flood-prone wards, we learnt that high urbanization and unplanned settlements have led to the mismanagement of waste materials, with negative knock-on effects.  Dar es Salaam…Read more

Community Flood Response Mapping and Damage Assessment, March 3rd 2019

As a means of emergency response after a flooding event or inland inundation, flood mapping helps to estimate the extent of the flood on a large scale. It is a basis of coordinating appropriate damage assessment activities, and providing relief to the victims. This blog explains an approach of community flood response by community mapping methods and rapid assessment to determine extent and damage. In responding to heavy rainfall on March, 3rd, 2019, that resulted in heavy flooding in some wards of Dar es Salaam Tanzania, the Ramani Huria team decided to conduct…Read more

Tabata Trash Mapping: Data for Solid Waste Management in Informal Settlements

Dar es Salaam is one of the fastest-growing cities in Africa. The population is expected to grow so much, that Dar es Salaam is projected to be the second-largest city by population in the world by 2100, with a predicted population of 76 million, (according to World Population Review). The annual growth rate is expected to average 4.39% through the year 2020. In the next three years, the population is expected to reach 5 million. With this rate of rapid urbanization and population increase with 70% of its people living in informal settlements,…Read more

Assessing the Geomorphological Characteristics of Soil in Dar es Salaam

Since its kick-off in 2015, the Ramani Huria Project has collected numerous amount of data to help mitigating and planning for flooding in Dar es Salaam. Data collected include historical flood extents data, drainage data, infrastructure - buildings, roads, drains, etc. We also conducted flood risk identification in more than 200 subwards of Dar es Salaam and mapped hyper-local boundaries of the city, famously and informally known as “shina boundaries”. Having all these data was not sufficient to produce a flood model of the city. There was one missing component in the data…Read more

Hyperlocal Boundary Mapping

After the risk identification process implemented in 228 subwards of the city, Ramani Huria is now going further to map the lowest level of administrative system that exists in Tanzania. To do this we have partnered up with Data Zetu to map hyperlocal boundaries in Dar es Salaam for better decision making. Finding people with exact addresses is nearly impossible, as most part of the city is unplanned. Therefore, mapping Dar es Salaam to such a detailed level will allow us to address issues at a neighborhood level for the first time. This…Read more