OMDTZ Community Impact Microgrants Call — 2021

By Hawa Adinani

Applications extended until 31st May 2021

Click here If you would like to submit your application in Swahili

OpenMap Development Tanzania (OMDTZ) with support from the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) through the Audacious Project is aiming to support OpenStreetMap (OSM) communities across Tanzania through the OMDTZ Community Impact Microgrants. This is a support program for local communities in Tanzania to leverage from OSM data, tools, and communities to help solve local challenges. OMDTZ is seeking to support and fund projects and/or communities that bring flexibility, local context, and practical ideas from the grassroots level that aim to solve communities’ problems through mapping.

The microgrants program is aiming to provide a range of 5,750,000–11,500,000/= Tanzanian shillings funds to at least eight (8) OSM communities each across Tanzania with practical ideas on how OSM data and mapping will support their communities to solve specific challenges and bring positive sustainable solutions.

The purpose of these microgrants is to expand Tanzania’s local community involvement in open mapping and have the necessary resources they need to grow and contribute to the solutions of the granular challenges that affect their daily livelihoods. OMDTZ expects that this will in turn lead to development in socio-economic activities and humanitarian responses that rely on the available open datasets.

The projects submitted must align with the following principles:

• Clear and concise project goals; successful applications will clearly define their project goals which will specify the end goal of the project, list of activities and how they will be carried out, time of execution of each activity, community to be involved, and the long vision of the project outcome.
• Ownership; successful applications will have to show how the community/organization will own the output and how they will use it to solve the challenges they face, who is in need of the data or training to be given, and why. Priority will be given to projects which will focus mostly on solving and uncovering local community problems and challenges.
• Inclusion i.e. gender consideration, the inclusion of youths and marginalized groups: priority will be given to proposals that include women and children in their training of open tools and capacity-building activities. The aim is to expand the number of women and other marginalized groups to learn and use different tools to boost their careers and involvement in solving community challenges.
• Open knowledge evolution; priority will be given to projects that aim to expand to peripheral regions of the country and expose them to open tools and OSM. Priority will also be given to proposals with plans of creating new OSM communities that will contribute to the growth of OSM in different regions of Tanzania.
• Cooperation; Priority will be given to projects that will work together as partners or form an alliance with the local government, private sector, or local community institutions and create champions who will carry on the work and expand beyond the grant period and reduce their daily work burden with tech knowledge and data.

Information on eligibility can be found on the information document here and the Swahili version can be found here

How to Apply?

To submit your application, you must fill this form with all the proposal details and upload the required documents. Templates for the project plan and budget can be downloaded here and here respectively. All applications will need to carefully consider the five project principles listed above.

To make sure all applications are inclusive and avoid language barriers, we will accept applications in Swahili; the submission form in Swahili is found here, and the project plan and budget templates can be found here and here. If you need any help to go through the application, please contact asha.mustapha@hotosm.org.

Applications extended until 31st May 2021

Mentoring

Mentoring will be available to all applicants for one (1) month before submission including support in project ideation, project planning, budget creation, and advice on stakeholder engagement. We provide mentorship to all applicants to support communities with great project ideas but are not able to formulate their ideas into a good write-up for funding.

All interested applicants are mandatorily required to request a mentor who will help them through the entire application process. You can ask for mentorship by sending your request email to asha.mustapha@hotosm.org with the title of your project

Note: Only applications within Tanzania (mainland and Zanzibar) will be accepted. Application outside Tanzania will not be accepted