THE World Bank (WB) and Ardhi University (ARU) have signed a landmark agreement that will see over three million Dar es Salaam residents being mapped in the second phase of the Ramani Huria initiative.
The newly scaled-up mapping initiative will be supported by the Bretton Woods Institution, UK’s Department for International Development (DfID), and several implementing partners.
Once the data from Ramani Huria is collected, according to the MoU, 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.
WB and ARU signed the MoU at a brief ceremony in Dar es Salaam yesterday, which lays out key areas of collaboration between the two institutions in their shared goal of addressing disaster risk through education.
The MoU was signed by WB Country Director, Bella Bird and ARU Vice-Chancellor, Professor Evaristo Liwa in the presence of DfID Deputy Head of Office, Thomas Allan and Dar es Salaam Deputy Regional Administrative Secretary (RAS), Mr Michael Ole, among others.
The partnership will prioritise 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.
It will also engage 300 Urban Planning and Geomatics students from ARU and equip them with skills to create sophisticated and highly accurate maps of localities around Dar es Salaam.
According to Ms Bird in 2011, a small collaboration led to the training of 25 students through their summer industrial placement, while in 2015 it was expanded to 165 students.
Now, according to her, over 300 students of ARU have been trained in next generation of mapping, planning, and surveying.
“This is a commitment that we are making to improve Tanzania’s skills base, and it is something that we have prioritised within the Urban Resilience Programme as we know that local skills and capacity is critical to the improvement of a city’s urban development,’’ she said.
The WB Country Director was optimistic that the partnership would contribute to providing more skills and job opportunities for young Tanzanians and build greater urban resilience in Dar es Salaam and across Tanzania.
She added that it would further serve as an example for collaboration and skill-building in other World Bank projects both in Tanzania and abroad.
The partnership also intends to 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.
In this case 700 students are expected to 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 and 305 sub-wards. Also, over 1,000 community members are expected to be trained in risk and resilience.
In his remarks, the ARU Vice- Chancellor (VC) said the initiative would stimulate innovations on a number of development endeavours and enhance the capacity of making informed decisions on development matters.
“ARU will continue to focus on expanding further the scope of the project to include the use of drones on mapping hazardous areas, make innovations on the available software as well as having a joint programme on mapping,’’ said Prof Liwa.
Prof Liwa added that ARU was endowing to open a spatial data laboratory that would be used as a mapping space and reserve for the collected information.
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