Ramani Huria's goal is resilience: to reduce the human impact of flooding. The most obvious way to do this is to reduce the likelihood of floods! Drainage is one of the ways to do so. The drainage system in Dar es Salaam is enormous and complex, with hundreds of thousands of drains, often alongside roads, ranging from enormous 3-meter-deep concrete channels along highways to 5-cm-deep hand-dug ditches draining individual home sites. To help reduce flooding, we can map the drains and analyze them in specialized hydrological modelling software. This can allow us to…Read more

On September 26th, the new era of Ramani Huria 2.0 was officially launched at Julius Nyerere International Convention Center, an event attended by key project stakeholders, including government officials, university officials, Red Cross members, mapping experts, community members, and, of course, the students of Ramani Huria.  Professor Evaristo Liwa, Vice Chancellor of Ardhi University, gave opening remarks that commenced with a briefing on the previous iteration of Ramani Huria - a project that successfully produced maps for 21 wards of the city, home to approximately 1.3 million residents. He noted that this scaled…Read more

One of the primary tasks of Ramani Huria is to assess flood extent across Dar es Salaam - and community engagement is at the heart of this activity. It is through this engagement that we have access to well-informed local knowledge, adding a level of depth to our identification of flood-prone areas that can only offered by the community itself. Using information gathered out in the field, we are further able to create a time series - advancing the possibility of identifying historical trends of Dar es Salaam’s flood extent. Through this method,…Read more

One of the main goals of Ramani Huria 2.0 is to scale up all drainage mapping efforts that were previously executed during the project’s pilot. Students have now been grouped into specialized groups to ease coordination and delegate according to skillset. These groups include: Drainage Team, GIS Team, Open MapKit Team, Community Outreach team and Remote Mapping Team. There was no clearly identified method for mapping drains, so our team had to test most of the known field mapping applications. After testing these applications, the GeoTrace feature, coupled with its ability to enable…Read more

Scaling up a field mapping project within a city of over 5 million people requires proper planning and training. We first wanted to give our field mappers a thorough overview of how data is inputted into OSM to ensure a clear understanding of the OSM ecosystem and how it works. At a later stage, we will be showing them how OSM data can be used for several different purposes. Teaching 300 new mappers how to map, however, comes with certain challenges. All of our mappers have been beginners, and most of them have…Read more

The new and expanded Ramani Huria 2.0 team, with just over three hundred students, is now getting to work with the practical work of field data collection and editing the digital map of Dar es Salaam. We've installed OpenDataKit (ODK), a free software toolset for data collection on Android smartphones. We'll be using some more sophisticated data collection systems such as OpenMapKit, a variant of ODK that allows direct interaction with OpenStreetMap data, but the venerable and mighty original ODK is a great place to start. We begin with practice surveys at in…Read more

The Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) and Ramani Huria, supported by the World Bank and partners are launching a brand-new adventure with Ardhi University today! Three hundred Urban Planning and Geomatics students from Ardhi University in Dar es Salaam are participating in a community mapping project in July and August. We will be mapping in 35 wards of the city, with an emphasis on the data needed to improve flood resilience. With the increasing impact of climate change and urbanization, urban flooding increasingly disrupts and threatens the lives of people in Dar es Salaam.…Read more