Half a Million Buildings Mapped

This is part of a series on the Industrial Training of Students on Zanzibar by Spatial Collective. You can read parts one, two, three, and four here.

Building upon previous efforts (read here and here), the State University of Zanzibar students finalized digitization of buildings on the Zanzibar Archipelago (Unguja and Pemba Islands).

Fifty students participated in the digitization effort. They added about 100,000 buildings to the pre-existing dataset of almost 400,000 buildings. The entire dataset was re-checked for errors and building reference numbers were assigned following the nomenclature put forth by the Zanzibar’s Commission for Lands.

Finally, once the mapping was complete, Spatial Collective secured an agreement with the Commission for Lands, who is the rightful owner of the data, to release the buildings and make them available in OpenStreetMap.

Below is an image of Unguja and Pemba Islands presented only through buildings.