Zanzibar Industrial Training Themes

Between August and October, we carried out the Resilience Academy Industrial Training during which we taught 50 students from the State University of Zanzibar on community mapping. The project was supported by the World Bank’s Open Cities Initiative and was also a part of the larger Tanzania Resilience Academy Initiative that targeted four Universities across Tanzania.

At the start of the exercise in August, the students met with the stakeholders from the civil society, government and the private sector to determine what are their key data needs. During the workshop, several themes continuously came up in the conversations:

• A need for a base map of Zanzibar Urban West
• A need for the road network of Zanzibar Urban West
• A need for a drainage map of Zanzibar Urban West
• A household survey of one of the most flood-affected areas in Zanzibar Urban West

Another goal was to use the Industrial Training to complete the digitization of Pemba Island, finalizing the mapping of buildings on the entire Archipelago in the process.

The training commenced on August 20 during which the students learned about project design, budget allocation, equipment set-up, basically, all the nitty-gritty of how to carry out an independent mapping of communities based on the stakeholders’ needs.

The specific topics covered were:

• How to design a mapping project
• How to conduct GPS data collection
• Introduction to OpenStreetMap
• How to map drainage
• How to digitize drone imagery using QuantumGIS
• How to use mobile phones for data collection
• How to set up a household survey using KOBO software

The students then used this newly acquired knowledge to collect approximately 15,000 GPS points of interest, 35 kilometers of drainage lines, 200 kilometers of roads, digitized about 100,000 buildings on Pemba Island, gathered 2,000 household surveys and hundreds of public opinions.

In the next blog posts, we’ll explore each individual topic in detail.