Background: A lot is happening within the Resilience Academy. Among the latest developments, data quality standards of the Tanzania Urban Resilience Program (TURP) and the Climate Risk Database (CRD) and protocols related, has been identified and created. 

To meet the standards, new activities are implemented to the whole life cycle of produce datasets that are published in the Climate Risk Database. With the standards and protocols the high quality of data sets produced in, for example, TURP projects, is ensured. Thus, the data users in the fields of urban planning, research, education and so on can reliably use the data sets and trust the quality of them. When using high-quality data also the results can be reliable and of high quality. 

CRD online training: A series of online training sessions is conducted to inform the CRD community, experts from partner Universities and some new members about these latest developments. The training is organized by Venla Aaltonen and Massoud Hamad. Due to the current situation with the global Coronavirus pandemic, the training is held completely online. Connecting people between Tanzania and Finland has been very successful: The Internet connections has worked well, and the participants of the training sessions have seen each other at least through webcams.

In addition of disseminating the new information to the community, the online training sessions also acts as a communication channel between all the key experts. Ideas, comments, feedback and greetings can be changed between the participants. For example, the insights of partner University experts or representatives of the World Bank are crucial when developing data quality standards and protocols.

So far two online training sessions as already been organized, and several are yet to come. The topics of the sessions circle around the concepts of data quality standards and activities related to them. Another branch of the training series is to train new platform developers, who might be interested in the maintenance of the GeoNode platform on which the Climate Risk Database is built. Below, the timetable and topics of the training sessions (modifications are possible).

All online training sessions are recorded, and the recordings are edited and published to the Resilience Academy YouTube page. Thus, everyone interested is able to follow the training even though they didn’t participate in the live web-meeting. So far, there have been 26 participants taking part in the live web-meetings.

To ask any questions regarding the online training, please contact Venla Aaltonen (voaaal@utu.fi) or Massoud Hamad (massoud.hamad@suza.ac.tz). We are happy to answer!

With best regards,
Venla Aaltonen
Digital Assets Manager
Tanzania Urban Resilience Program, Resilience Academy
voaaal@utu.fi