Mapping

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

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

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

Students Complete Industrial Training – 228 Mapped Subwards and Action Maps for Disaster Management of Dar es Salaam

2018 has been a year for floods. In March, excessive rains in East Africa killed nearly 500 people. In July, Japan saw heavy downpours which led to widespread devastation with more than 200 deaths. In August, another 300 people lost their lives in Kerala, India during the worst monsoon in nearly a century. And just this month, Typhoon Mangkhut has killed over a 100 in the Philippines while the east coast of the United States has witnessed unprecedented flooding as a result of Hurricane Florence. In Tanzania, students from Ardhi University and the…Read more

Mapping Dar es Salaam’s Water, Sanitation and Hygiene Facilities

WaSH is a collective term for water, sanitation and hygiene. While each is a separate field of work, they are interdependent in nature. After flooding, communities are very vulnerable to outbreaks of disease such as cholera. Building off a foundation of ongoing response efforts for this in Dar es Salaam, Ramani Huria has started a rapid sanitation mapping campaign within the city’s wards, mainly focusing on public toilets. With the well-trained Ramani Huria team available, this is approached by dividing the team into two groups with two different methods of data collection but…Read more

Participating in Dar es Salaam’s Cycle Caravan, Mapping Bicycle Routes

Each year, 5th June marks World Environment Day, a day for raising global awareness to take positive environmental action to protect nature and the planet Earth. This year’s Sunday 5th June saw UWABA (Umma wa Wapanda Baiskeli; or “Public Cycling Community”), a cycling community in Dar es Salaam in cooperation with European Union, organizing the cycling caravan. This is to support low carbon transport, to promote environmental alternatives to high carbon transport as well as putting emphasis on the presence (or absence) of bicycle roads/routes in the city. With the motivation to do…Read more

A Day in The Life of a Dar Es Salaam Mapper: Mapping Drainage in Chang’ombe

*Guest post by Kathryn Davis, Columbia University* January 14th, 10:30 am. We arrive in Chang'ombe ward (an industrial area in Dar es Salaam) after weaving in and out of traffic in the project bajaj (rickshaw) through different neighbourhoods. Johannes Peter, a seasoned mapper with the Dar Ramani Huria project, takes another look at his drone imagery printout of the area and indicates that we’ve arrived at our starting point. He starts the OSMTracker app on his phone, ready to start work (the tracker app helps him to geolocate, and take pictures of interesting…Read more

Red Cross Volunteers Active in Mapping Vingunguti

Vingunguti is an administrative ward in Ilala district in western Dar Es Salaam and according to the 2012 census has a population of 106,946. Vingunguti ward is a flood-prone area of Dar es Salaam and many settlements within it are informal. The Msimbazi River flows around the West and North boundary of the ward, and during the rainy season is a major cause of flooding. Launching mapping in Vingunguti Ramani Huria launched mapping in Vingunguti with a community forum taking place on 11th September 2015. Red Cross volunteers were excited to be present…Read more
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