Tanzania Resilience Academy

About the project

About this project

The Resilience Academy (RA) is a World Bank–led university partnership and service-delivery programme that improves the digital skills, competences and employment of African youth for more effective disaster-risk management. It is Pillar 4 of the Tanzania Urban Resilience Program (TURP, launched in 2017 by the Government of Tanzania, the World Bank and UK DFID/FCDO), and it grows directly out of Ramani Huria — the Dar es Salaam community-mapping programme that trained hundreds of students and mapped roughly three-quarters of the city into OpenStreetMap.

Tanzanian cities face rising climate risk amid rapid, weakly-planned growth and a shortage of up-to-date digital data. RA closes two gaps at once — the missing climate-risk data and youth unemployment — by having students produce the missing data as they learn. Its guiding principle is that future solutions must be locally driven, low-complexity, fit-for-purpose and youth-engaging, so decisions are reliable, owned locally and actionable over time.

RA delivers through five services: the Climate Risk Database (CRD), the flagship annual mass-internships / industrial training (150–200 students a year since 2019), digital micro-tasking, open e-learning (mini-MOOCs on Digicampus), and research & innovation. More than 1,300 students have been trained since 2016, and the CRD now holds hundreds of open datasets across a dozen-plus Tanzanian cities.

The programme is led by four Tanzanian universities — Ardhi University, the University of Dar es Salaam, Sokoine University of Agriculture and the State University of Zanzibar — with the University of Turku (Finland) as Secretariat and international partners including ITC / University of Twente, TU Delft and TU Dortmund. Its community-mapping backbone is Open Map Development Tanzania (OMDTZ). Governance rotates annually among the universities, with the Tanzania ICT Commission (ICTC) linking the programme to clients and funding. Recent diversification includes GIZ ProWAS-SASA (2024–2026) and BLUE-ZAN.

Objectives

• Build and sustain an open climate-risk data commons — the Climate Risk Database (CRD)
• Train youth in open-source, low-cost geospatial and data skills, on real data
• Engage local communities and ward officials in mapping urban risk
• Create digital-work and employment pathways for young people
• Embed geospatial curricula for credit in partner universities (RA does not self-accredit)
• Pilot out-of-the-box data & technology solutions through research & innovation

Key activities