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Tanzania Resilience Academy

● Ongoing

Dar es Salaam

Living lab · Experiment

Tanzania Resilience Academy

Local talent producing the local data that builds local resilience — and gaining employable skills by doing it.

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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

Tanzania Resilience Academy

Project outputs

Impact, data & learning resources

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Impact & outcomes

View impact dashboard →

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Training materials

Browse all materials →

The wider picture

How this project connects

Everything linked to this project, and what those links add up to.

1138+ People reached unique learners enrolled in linked courses
246+ Programme participants approved across those programmes
1263+ Learners enrolled in the programmes and their courses
139+ Datasets in this project’s reports

Counted from the links below, not entered by hand — a person reached through several of them is counted once.

Programs10

  • Community & Flood-Resilience Mapping Community & Flood-Resilience Mapping
  • Urban Drainage Mapping Urban Drainage Mapping
  • Building-Footprint Digitization Building-Footprint Digitization
  • Solid-Waste & Litter Mapping Solid-Waste & Litter Mapping
  • Urban Greening & Tree Mapping Urban Greening & Tree Mapping
  • Zanzibar Land, Tourism & Property-Tax Mapping Zanzibar Land, Tourism & Property-Tax Mapping
  • Digital Micro-tasking — Cash for Digital Work Digital Micro-tasking — Cash for Digital Work
  • Urban Heat Watch Urban Heat Watch
  • Geospatial Technology & Data Science Geospatial Technology & Data Science
  • Resilience Academy for ProWAS-SASA ProWAS SASA Partners training – GIZ ProWAS-SASA

The Programmes are by invitations, request to join if you are Interested in joining one?

Team Members19

Courses11

Posts49

Reports & publications

View all reports →
Wading out the Storm- The Role of Poverty in Exposure Vulnerability and Resilience to Floods in Dar es Salaam(Swahili)Report · PDFDownload ↓
Wading out the Storm- The Role of Poverty in Exposure Vulnerability and Resilience to Floods in Dar es Salaam(English)Report · PDFDownload ↓
TURP Annual Report 2021Report · PDFDownload ↓
TURP Annual Report 2020Report · PDFDownload ↓
TURP Annual Report 2019Report · PDFDownload ↓
TURP Annual Report 2018Report · PDFDownload ↓
Ramani Huria Flood Resilience Atlas for Dar es salaamReport · PDFDownload ↓
TURP Annual Report 2017Report · PDFDownload ↓
Pandemic Continuity of Operations Plan for DarMAERTReport · PDFDownload ↓
Lessons Learned Exercise for Emergency Preparedness and Response in TanzaniaReport · PDFDownload ↓
Flood Contingency Plan (Swahili)Report · PDFDownload ↓
Flood Contingency Plan (English)Report · PDFDownload ↓
DarMAERT Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) HandbookReport · PDFDownload ↓
Emergency Operations Center Handbook for DarMAERTReport · PDFDownload ↓
DarMAERT Emergency Response Plan 2020 (English)Report · PDFDownload ↓
DarMAERT Emergency Response Plan 2020 (Swahili)Report · PDFDownload ↓
Contingency Plan for Tsunami Caused by EarthquakeReport · PDFDownload ↓
TURP DatasetsDataset collection · 139 datasetsView datasets →

Project partners

This project brings together 5 universities & research partners and 1 community organisation — 2 of the 4 sectors of our living lab.

Universities & research

ARU

Ardhi University

Universities & research

UDSM

University of Dar es Salaam

Universities & research

SUZA

State University of Zanzibar

Universities & research

Sokoine University of Agriculture

Sokoine University of Agriculture

Universities & research

UTU

University of Turku

Communities

OMDT

OpenMap Development Tanzania

Funders & supporters

World Bank

The World Bank

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Partner with Resilience Academy to map hazards, open geospatial data and build resilience with communities across Tanzania.

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