Join our session to understand solutions for the Urban Future using localised community data collection and management with affordable technology

This session aims to uncover how the Resilience Academy has shifted the data needs-to-end user narrative through partnering with Tanzanian universities and harnessing innovating data collection processes with students to produce high-quality low-cost locally verified data and information for decision making, innovations, and more. We hope that the participants will be inspired with new ideas for cost and time-effective high-quality localized data collection, spurring local jobs and employment, that could support their programs and work.

Turku, Finland

Session Summary

This session, hosted by the Resilience Academy (RA)’s Msilikale Msilanga, with support from panellists within the Academy, the University of Turku, and Open Map Development Tanzania (OMDTZ), aimed to showcase their collaborative data collection programme. This programme equips students from partner Universities to identify and collect missing data on urban communities in Tanzania and helps to give them the tools to visualize and map the data they collect. As students collect data from citizens, households and businesses, they also learn about the challenges facing these communities, which range from flooding to poverty to climate change impacts.

This programme not only boosts our understanding of the Tanzanian urban environment by filling in data gaps, it also gives students a stipend for their work, and starts to build work experience for those involved. The data collected then feeds into many postgraduate research projects such as research on river flooding and rainfall prediction through machine learning, promoting knowledge creation in this arena as well.

Two former students of the more than 300 beneficiaries of the programme shared their pride in being a part of something like this, and in particular, spoke with excitement about the ways that the programme allowed for active collaboration between students and professors.