News — 02 July, 2021

Fostering the Use of Open Mapping Technologies in Government Departments — Mwanza, Tanzania (by OMDTZ)

After five months of data collection in Mwanza, on 12th to 15th April 2021, the Ramani Huria consortium facilitated a final workshop with key government officials to share the methodology, collected data, and discussions on how they can use the data for disaster management and risk reduction in Ilemela and Nyamagana.

Efforts to fill the data gap existing in disaster management in Tanzania escalated in 2015 when the United Kingdom’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) and the World Bank partnered with the government of Tanzania to increase resilience to climate and disaster risk through the Tanzania Urban Resilience Program (TURP). This program is guided by three pillars (Risk Identification, Risk Reduction, and Disaster Preparedness & Emergency Management). To identify urban risks, the Ramani Huria project — a community mapping project for flood resilience in Dar es Salaam — identified areas at risk of flooding in Dar es Salaam by mapping buildings, drainage systems, roads, trash & solid waste, etc. to show precisely where flooding occurs and the issues causing the flooding. This project made Dar es Salaam the most detailed mapped city in Africa.

Replicating and extending the same efforts in Mwanza, the second-largest city in Tanzania, the consortium — (Spatial collective, Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team and OpenMap Development Tanzania) worked with university students and local community members in Mwanza to collect different types of data such as rockfall incidents, flood extent data and drainage systems in Nyamagana and Ilemela municipals and updated the building exposure of the two municipalities on OpenStreetMap. The aim was to fill the existing data gap and provide disaster managers, city planners and other stakeholders with relevant datasets needed for decision-making.

Read the rest of this news on the OpenMap Development Tanzania website.