OMDTZ Awards Seven Microgrants for the OSM Community in Tanzania

By Hawa Adinani

Seven communities in Tanzania have been selected to receive OMDTZ Community Impact Microgrant. The communities that are awarded the microgrants include Suza Youthmappers, Smcose Youth Mappers, Agri Thamani Foundation, Lake Victoria Shore Environmental HIV/AIDS Project Tanzania (LAVISEHA), Red Cross Society Katavi, IRDP YouthMappers Dodoma and Hope For Girls And Women Tanzania. Congratulations to these communities!

OpenMap Development Tanzania, supported by the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team awarded microgrants to seven OSM communities in Tanzania from seven different regions — Kagera, Dodoma, Mara, Katavi, Mwanza, Morogoro, and Zanzibar. The grants provided will support these communities to leverage the use of OSM and mapping to help solve different community challenges. The grants provided will be used to facilitate training/workshop, purchase tools and equipment, support staff and other logistics needed.

The communities selected will implement their project in a duration of 3 to 6 months. The projects supported include Schools mapping to improve the education system in Zanzibar, Solid wastes mapping for flood resilience, Community mapping to improve nutrition status in Bukoba, Community mapping for gender-based violence, Community mapping for disease outbreaks e.g. ebola, Infrastructural mapping, and Health facilities mapping.

The projects of the seven communities that received microgrants are highlighted below:

• SUZA YouthMappers — Mapping schools to improve the education system in Zanzibar, the data to be collected is a request from the ministry of education in Zanzibar to help add GIS data in their e-system with all school locations.
• SMCoSE YouthMappers — Solid wastes mapping for flood resilience, a project aiming at addressing local plastic challenge which leads to flooding. The project will create plastic waste datasets in Ifakara that will be openly available to support informed decisions in disaster management.
• Agri Thamani Foundation — Improving nutritional status in Bukoba urban district using open mapped data. The map data will be used to generate, monitor, and evaluate nutritional-related data from community level and household level surveys to inform stakeholders on the nutritional status as well as advocate for decision-making policy advocacy efforts.
• Red Cross Society Katavi — Community mapping for public health and epidemics control such as Ebola. The project aims at mapping all roads/ways that are used for illegal/ unofficial entry to Tanzania that is available in Katavi so as to be able to track people’s entry and contacts, mainly for public health and disease control such as Ebola.
• Lake Victoria Shore Environmental HIV/AIDS Project Tanzania (LAVISEHA) — Generating data for gender-based violence by mapping areas with a high prevalence of GBV to improve service provisions such as community campaigns and security.
• IRDP YouthMappers Dodoma — Social facilities mapping in Mnadani ward, Dodoma. The mapping will include collecting road data and important facilities such as hospitals and schools available as requested by the ward officer so as to support evidence-based decision
• Hope For Girls And Women Tanzania — Health facilities mapping in Mugumu, Serengeti. The project aims at mapping health facilities and their capacity so as to understand to what extent the available facilities fit the existing needs. The data will be used by Mara Redcross and Hope for Girls and women — an organization that works to eradicate gender-based violence.

The OMDTZ team would like to thank the review and selection panel Samson Ngumenawe from Uganda Laura Mugeha from Kenya, Tommy Charles from Sierra Leone and Amedeus Kimaro from Tanzania. Also special thanks to HOT community support Sophie Mower and Geoffrey Kateregga for their invaluable and continued support to this process.