Zanzibar Resilience Academy

Since 2017, we spent many months on Zanzibar working with the government and other stakeholders on data collection activities. The main focus of these activities was to utilize the rectified drone imagery provided by the Zanzibar Mapping Initiative and generate datasets critical to disaster risk management.

Between May 2017 and March 2018, the first phase of the project called Digitizing the Outputs of the Zanzibar Mapping Initiative was implemented. The main landmarks of this phase include establishing a digitization laboratory at the Commission for Lands (COLA); determining digitization and quality control standards; training 30 COLA staff and State University students in digitization; altogether, approximately 220,000 buildings were digitized, reviewed and cleaned with building reference numbers assigned to each building.

Then, between July 2018 and February 2019, the second phase called Open Cities Africa was carried out. This project built on the first by adding 180,000 buildings to the map and implementing a GPS and household survey in the Zanzibar City’s center. Finally, several maps were produced, including an interactive map on urban resilience.

In mid-2019, we are building on these two initiatives through the Resilience Academy’s Industrial Training. This project is a part of the larger Tanzania Resilience Academy Initiative that targets four Universities across Tanzania. The  Zanzibar program will teach 50 students from the State University all the nitty-gritty of community mapping, from project design, budget allocation, equipment set-up, to carrying out independent mapping of communities based on the stakeholders’ needs.

Specifically, this assignment will:

1. Provide a good working environment for emerging data and technological communities on Zanzibar, with the focus on University students;
2. Design and implement mapping of Zanzibar City and create an openly licensed dataset;
3. Ensure all data collected is collected to an agreed quality standard;
4. Build a cadre of students to implement community mapping; and
5. Produce maps and datasets.

The Resilience Academy training on Zanzibar began on the 20^th of August 2019 and will continue for the next 8 weeks, so many more blog posts coming soon.