Community Mapping and Open Development in Dar Es Salaam

SUBMITTED BY JOSHUA GOLDSTEIN 

Community members creating maps of Tandale Ward, Dar Es Salaam

(Photo by: Mark Iliffe)

In Dar Es Salaam, one of the fastest-growing cities in the world, the local authorities, with support from the Tanzania-based World Bank urban and regional government teams, are working hard to improve urban services for the poor.  Before allocating scarce resources to building roads, streetlights, solid waste collection points or roadside drainage, Tanzanian officials must first understand how a community understands its challenges and priorities for the future.

In an effort supported through a unique partnership between The World Bank andTwaweza, a regional ICT NGO, an impressive array of civic actors are leveraging information and communication technologies (ICTs) to create a new approach to this challenge in Tandale Ward, a vibrant unplanned community a few kilometres west of Dar Es Salaam’s city centre. Inspired by Map Kibera,  the first community-built online map of Nairobi's largest slum, Ardhi University’s School of Urban and Regional Planning (SURP) and residents of Tandale spent much of August using GPS units to collect a wide range of public data points, from school and public toilets to health clinics and trash dumps. With the help of free and open-source software, these volunteers loaded these data onto Open Street Map (OSM), a freely accessible online map.

The effort in Tandale is an ongoing experiment in what Aleem Waljidescribes as the shift from open data to open development, where “citizen data and user-generated content [can create] opportunities for Governments to listen better to their people and be more responsive to their constituents.”  The interactive map is a new information resource for the community and a powerful point of reference for government discussion and decision-making about upcoming infrastructure upgrades.

The map’s granular, community-level open data provides new opportunities for what Harvard urban economist Edward Glaeser characterises as “self-protecting urban innovation, cities’ abilities to generate the information needed to solve their own problems.” On top of this data, technologists and issue experts can build tools to help better understand and respond to the city's most pressing problems. Within days of the initial mapping, Ramani Tandale, a website that allows residents to report flooding, broken street lights and other issues to an online map, was launched. In the future, teams of developers and community leaders in Dar Es Salaam could build smartphone applications to track solid waste collection, web visualisations of drainage catchment areas, or a dashboard to help public service providers better manage citizen requests.

As we continue to draw lessons from Tandale, it is clear that a network of civic actors, encouraged by local public service providers, can use low-cost technology to create new opportunities for accountability, enable data-driven government policy-making and start a more inclusive and open development process.