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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

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

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

Two Hundred Subwards of Dar es Salaam to be Mapped by University Students in the Next Six Weeks

On the 23rd of July 2018, Humanitarian Openstreetmap Team (HOT) began scaling up the World Bank funded Dar Ramani Huria project, training over 400 students who will map flood hazards in Dar es Salaam. This year Ramani Huria is working with students from the University of Dar es Salaam and Ardhi University, aiming to extend to other universities in following years such as Sokoine University of Agriculture in Morogoro and the State University of Zanzibar.  The students participating in this summer’s program are from diverse academic backgrounds, including participants studying Urban Planning, Geomatics,…Read more

Community mapping for flood modelling 2.0

Dar es Salaam’s Ramani Huria 2.0 project is one of the most comprehensive community mapping projects currently ongoing. A large use case for the collected map data is improving knowledge on flood hazard, vulnerability and exposure, all three components of the risk framework. Mapping of the type, dimensions and state of the drainage network is an important component and has the potential to establish detailed flood inundation models that can be used to simulate floods at unprecedented scales. Earlier, we reported on the state of the drainage mapping after Ramani Huria 1.0. Now,…Read more

Mapping for EBOLA in DRC Congo: Creating spatial data sets to help responders in the field

“These people have never been mapped, nobody has ever cared enough about them to even know where their house is. So these houses that you have been tracing today, is the first time that anyone has ever cared enough about those people in that distant part of the Congo enough to know where they live and put them on the map. To be on the map is to be acknowledged, it is to be known, it is to be recognized, it is to be counted. It is for the world to know that…Read more

Using Cheap and Practical Devices to Measure Elevation

Ramani Huria and The World Bank are trying to figure out the best way to calculate elevation in Dar es Salaam so that it can be integrated into the flood model that is currently underway. Measuring elevation requires a series of complicated measurements.  At the end of April 2018, three Civil Engineering students from Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands - Huck, Detmar and Martijn - arrived in Dar es Salaam to build cheap and practical devices to measure elevation. They will be spending two months in Dar es Salaam to work…Read more

Innovation Week 2018 – BUNI Hub COSTECH

On  May 24th 2018, the Ramani Huria team participated in the Humanitarian Development Innovation Fund’s (HDIF) Innovation Week exhibition at BUNI Hub Tanzania. The aim for this engagement was to showcase how innovation has helped Ramani Huria to conduct mapping activities in a more precise way,with minimal costs. The Ramani Huria philosophy, “local people, local tools, open knowledge”, encapsulates the power of innovation to equip local people with the information needed to transform their communities.  The innovations of Ramani Huria that were showcased at the event included: community mapping methods and the discovery…Read more

Community meetings- For Flood resilience plan

Photo; Community meeting. On the 26th March 2018 the HOT Tanzania team conducted a pilot community meeting in Mbuyuni subward in Kigogo ward. The main objective of the meeting was to facilitate a discussion with different actors such as Mtaa Executive Officers  (MEO), Chairmen of the Subward, Councilors, Wajumbe leaders, Non Governmental Organizations and Community Based Organizations such as Tegemeo. Tegemeo provide education to the community on topics such as environmental education and how to support orphans - it operates nationwide. During this meeting, community members pinpointed assets that they considered to be…Read more

Flood Mapping

Since 2015, Ramani Huria has been tackling the issue of flooding in Dar es Salaam to reduce flooding and encourage sustainable water resource management. Now in the second phase of the project, Ramani Huria 2.0 is focusing on mapping the most flood prone Wards of Dar Es Salaam, such as Kigogo and Hananasif Wards, to produce flood extent information which will later be used to inform decision making and flood mitigation plans. The Ramani Huria team begin the community mapping process by introducing themselves to the ward officers, explaining the project and providing…Read more