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Good practice Imported

Ramani Huria — Community-Mapped Flood-Resilience Data for Dar es Salaam

Tanzania · Dar es Salaam · See the Tanzania profile · See the Dar es Salaam profile

Evidence: Observational / pre–post Top 12% 86/100 · Ask Evidence Copilot about this practice

Dar es Salaam's Ramani Huria trained 450 community members and students to map flood-prone informal settlements with OpenStreetMap and drones. Since 2015 it has mapped 29 wards, 1,254km waterways and 3,396km roads, reaching 2 million residents, per its official impact report.

450
Community mappers trained
29
Wards mapped
1254 km
Waterways surveyed
3396 km
Roads surveyed
2000000
Residents reached (estimated)
10
Community-run disaster-prevention teams established
21
Wards mapped (earlier project stage) (earlier stage)
1300000
Residents covered (earlier project stage) (earlier stage, of city's then 5.5 million residents)
Ramani Huria — Community-Mapped Flood-Resilience Data for Dar es Salaam

Details

Maturity
Established
Promoter
OpenMap Development Tanzania (Ramani Huria), with Dar es Salaam City Council, University of Dar es Salaam, Ardhi University, World Bank/GFDRR and the Red Cross
Period
2015–present
Keywords
civic data, urban planning, disaster risk reduction, open mapping

Context

Ramani Huria ('open map' in Swahili) is a community-based mapping programme launched in 2015 in Dar es Salaam, where flooding regularly displaces low-income residents of informal settlements that were absent from official maps some 20 years out of date. It is run by the locally-established NGO OpenMap Development Tanzania, in partnership with Dar es Salaam City Council, the University of Dar es Salaam, Ardhi University, the World Bank/GFDRR and the Red Cross.

Objectives

The programme trains university students and community volunteers to survey their own neighbourhoods -- recording roads, buildings, drainage channels and flood-prone areas on OpenStreetMap -- supplemented by drone imagery for hard-to-reach areas, so that flood-risk planning can be based on current, locally-verified data.

Activities

Volunteers and students are trained as mappers; ground survey data is combined with drone imagery; the programme has also established community-run disaster-prevention teams in flood-prone areas.

Results

According to the programme's own published impact figures, it has trained 450 mappers, mapped 29 wards across the city's Kinondoni, Ilala, Temeke and Ubungo districts, surveyed 1,254km of waterways and 3,396km of roads, and established 10 community-run disaster-prevention teams, with the resulting data affecting an estimated 2 million residents. World Bank documentation independently confirms an earlier stage of the project -- 21 wards covering roughly 1.3 million of the city's then 5.5 million residents -- and quotes a Kinondoni Municipality planning official confirming the maps were being incorporated into Dar es Salaam's official Master Plan.

Conclusions

The World Bank's own review frames this as filling a genuine data gap rather than a finished solution: prior to the project, the city's flood-risk planners were working from base maps over two decades old, and coverage -- while extensive -- still represents a subset of a rapidly expanding city, so the mapping effort requires ongoing renewal to stay current.

Implementation
Indicative cost
Medium (€50k–€500k) — Multi-year community training and field-survey programme (450 trained mappers, drone imagery) backed by World Bank/GFDRR and partner universities; no specific budget figure is stated in the source -- estimated medium cost band.
Time to results
Long (> 3 years) — Continuously running since 2015 (over a decade), now embedded in Dar es Salaam's official Master Plan -- a long, open-ended civic-data infrastructure effort.
Staffing & skills
OpenMap Development Tanzania (implementing NGO), Trained community volunteers and university students (mappers), Dar es Salaam City Council, University of Dar es Salaam and Ardhi University (academic partners)

Conditions for success

  • Local community members trained to map their own neighbourhoods
  • Partnership with city council enabling integration into the official Master Plan
  • Support from World Bank/GFDRR and the Red Cross
  • Ground survey supplemented with drone imagery for hard-to-reach areas

Common failure modes

  • Coverage still represents only a subset of a rapidly expanding city, requiring ongoing renewal to stay current
  • Base maps were over two decades out of date prior to the project, illustrating the risk of data going stale again without sustained mapping effort

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Data sources

Where this practice's information was retrieved from, and when.

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