More than 3.5 million residents to be mapped through WB project

What you need to know:

  • The mapping initiative by the World Bank, DfID, and several implementation partners, will engage 300 Urban Planning and Geomatics students from Ardhi University and equip them with skills to create sophisticated and highly accurate maps of localities around Dar es Salaam.

 About 3.5 million citizens from 40 wards in the city will be mapped during the implementation of the second phase of Ramani Huria.

The mapping initiative by the World Bank, DfID, and several implementation partners, will engage 300 Urban Planning and Geomatics students from Ardhi University and equip them with skills to create sophisticated and highly accurate maps of localities around Dar es Salaam.

The Ramani Huria scale up, which was launched on Tuesday September 26, in Dar es Salaam will employ community knowledge, elevation measurements, and drainage modelling to better understand where flooding has happened in the past, where it may happen in the future, and what mitigation actions will be required.

Students will receive training and heavily transferable skills in GIS as they work to collect data on Dar es Salaam’s drainage, health care services, toilets, water sources, and various elements of urban infrastructure within 40 city wards.

A Memorandum of Understanding signed between the World Bank and Ardhi University at the launch ceremony lays out key areas for collaboration between the two institutions in their shared goal of addressing disaster risk through education.

The partnership will prioritize continuous engagement in Ramani Huria, the establishment of a training laboratory for resilience mapping, and the development of a joint curriculum for training and retraining of professionals on resilience mapping as well as online sharing and accessing of data.

Once the data from Ramani Huria is collected, all resulting maps will be used by the Government for flood management and general planning, informing improvements to drainage, health care, social service delivery, and other infrastructural development.