Tanzania Resilience Academy

Background

Tanzanian cities are increasingly vulnerable to climate risks, due to challenges including rapid and largely uncontrolled growth with weak urban and land use planning, little information to assess vulnerability and risk, and a widening infrastructure gap. The Tanzania Urban Resilience Project (TURP) is a partnership between the UK Department for International Development and the World Bank to support the Government of Tanzania with the objective to build urban resilience to current climate variability and future climate change in Tanzania’s cities and towns. This will be achieved through improved data and evidence, urban planning, and infrastructure provision for sustainable economic growth and development. This will be achieved by addressing (1) risk identification, (2) risk reduction, and (3) emergency preparedness and (4) by developing a Resilience Academy.

The Resilience Academy represents the commitment of the World Bank to improve Tanzania’s skill base and to maximize the TURP impact and sustainability through the establishment of university partnerships that transfer skills and risk management tools to the next generation. Partnerships with the Tanzanian academic community have been integral to TURP activities. Ramani Huria, ‘Open Map’ in Swahili, trained and guided university students required to complete internship programs to use community mapping to obtain exposure data of the city of Dar es Salaam. Guided by the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap team, more than 313 university students in 2017 and 597 students in 2018 were trained, creating an open map of the city of unprecedented detail. The value of this exercise is twofold. Firstly, students are equipped with critical digital skills for urban planning and resilience. Secondly, the data itself – which includes exposure data, flood extents, and community assets – is fundamental for emergency response and mitigating the future effects of flood.

Having this data is unique resource for the city of Dar es Salaam. A Climate Risk Geonode (Online content
management system) should be developed to centralize the data, increase it’s accessibility, and stimulate
research by national and international academia. This, in turn, will help better understand the problems and propose effective solutions, as well as encourage others to replicate activities and facilitate institutional and policy change. Tanzanian university internship programs have proven to be a successful workflow to obtain the exposure data and engage the community. TURP has been the financial driver behind the Ramani Huria project, but this is not sustainable. A long-term vision of these internships should identify specific clients for the spatial data, who can work together with the universities and students to continuously update the information in the Climate Risk Geonode – thus enhancing the program sustainability. The internships will increase the understanding of how the data can be accessed and used by (governmental) users and thereby inform policy and decision-making.

Not only the data itself, but the data collection methods used in the Ramani Huria program were tailored to the local context. The Resilience Academy aims to embed these best-practices and appropriate workflows (such as community mapping and drone image acquisition) into the academic curricula offered by the Tanzanian Universities. Previous components of the Resilience Academy include the signing of an MoU with Ardhi University and the development of Cookbook and Curriculum describing the Ramani Huria workflow by the University of Twente in collaboration with Tanzanian counterparts at Ardhi University and the University of Dar es Salaam. The present contract aims to extend this work by developing additional modules, training Tanzanian university staff to execute these modules within existing academic programs, revise them through student feedback, and share the contents as open course ware, thus imparting critical urban resilience skills to future generations.

Project Objectives

The main objective of this assignment is to establish the foundation of the Resilience Academy, developing long-term practices to support the generation and usage of geospatial data for urban resilience and to embed the associated academic and practical skills into Tanzanian Universities. A target group of four core Tanzanian universities shall be of Ardhi University, University of Dar es Salaam, Sokine University and State University of Zanzibar.

This entails: enabling access to the geospatial data collected through TURP with the aim of supporting Disaster Risk Management (DRM) in the city of Dar es Salaam; encouraging the usage, analysis, and visualization of this data through the development of open-access education materials and capacity development together with Tanzanian Universities; and supporting the development of long-term strategies of incorporating participatory mapping and DRM workflows into the internship modalities of Tanzanian Universities. Ultimately, the capacity building activities of the Resilience Academy will shape and institutionalize the management of climate risk information into the Tanzanian context.

These objectives will be achieved through the following activities:
● Establish a Climate Risk GeoNode environment as a content management system for climate risk information and research;
● Develop open-access education materials regarding the usage, analysis, and visualization of data contained in the Geonode through partnerships with local Tanzanian Universities and to support the integration of these materials into university curricula and training of the staff and students.
● To develop a long-term vision for the Ramani Huria internship model based on partnerships with end-users with the aim of updating the geospatial data and providing university students with practical skills needed to apply their acquired academic knowledge in society