News — 22 April, 2015

Updates from Dar es Salaam

For the past three weeks, the HOT team in Tanzania comprising of Steven Bukulu, Geoffrey Kateregga, Paul Uithol and Jeff  Haack has been involved in Community Mapping  in Ndugumbi a Ward in Kinondoni district of Dar es Salaam. This is the first ward  mapped after which several wards will follow. The result has been a well detailed map of the ward.

A group of 15 students from Urban Planning students from Ardhi University has been trained in data collection, integration, and validation. In turn they also trained a group of 10 community members from Ndugumbi ward which helped them master the skills gained.

At a later stage InaSAFE will be used to perform Flood Impact Scenarios for better planning, preparedness and response activities. Therefore the HOT team has developed a data model for the mapping in Dar es Salaam to allow the data collected be used in InaSAFE.

With the help of the Ndugumbi Ward Office the Mapping team was hosted by Ndugumbi Primary School in the school's ICT room as the centre of operations in the ward. The mapping process involved going out to for data collection in the morning after which digitisation was done under the super vision of the team leaders.

The HOT team also benefited a lot from the availability of good quality imagery which was captured a few weeks ago by drones from the DroneAdventures team. Teams can easily trace buildings and roads accurately which improves the quality of the data.

To put a local touch to the work, the project was named "Dar Ramani Huria" which means the "OpenStreetMap of Dar es Salaam" and we are keeping a blog here with posts in both Swahili and English with contributions  from the Students and Community Members.

As the work in Ndugumbi gets complete, the HOT team is heading to Tandale one of the biggest slums in Dar es Salaam to engage the community in Mapping for Flood Resilience.