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Water Security & Climate Resilience Visualization Challenge: Transforming Data into Actionable Insights for Tanga and Mwanza Cities

2025

The visualization challenge focuses on addressing critical water security and climate resilience issues in Tanzania’s rapidly growing urban centers, particularly Mwanza and Tanga cities, which face significant flooding risks, inadequate wastewater management, and environmental pollution due to industrial effluents.

By utilizing flood data from Mwanza’s Mirongo River and wastewater data from Export Processing Zones, managed through the Climate Risk Database (CRD), the challenge aims to support informed, climate-resilient water management decisions. Participants will develop key technical skills such as geospatial data analysis, GIS mapping, and data visualization; analytical abilities including problem-solving and pattern recognition; communication competencies like visual storytelling and stakeholder engagement; and collaborative skills that promote multi-stakeholder coordination and knowledge transfer.

Emphasizing innovation and impact, the challenge encourages solution-oriented thinking, policy relevance, sustainability planning, and technology integration to transform data insights into practical recommendations. Ultimately, this initiative fosters student-industry cooperation to enhance data-driven decision-making and contribute to sustainable urban development and climate resilience in Tanzanian cities.

The winning prizes for this challenge are 300 EUR for the first-winning group, 200 EUR for the second-winning group, and 100 EUR for the third-winning group.

Mwanza | Tanga

Challenge descriptions:

Transforming Data into Actionable Insights for Lake Victoria Basin Water Board (LVBWB), Mwanza City
The Lake Victoria Basin Water Board (LVBWB) faces challenges identified within data visualization current manual or fragmented management of client permits and billing database poses significant challenges, including missed renewal opportunities, overdue payments, and the failure to identify inactive accounts in a timely manner. These gaps lead to increased compliance risks, revenue loss, and diminished customer satisfaction. Without an integrated system to monitor key deadlines and customer activity, organizations struggle to respond proactively to impending permit expirations or overdue bills, ultimately undermining operational efficiency and regulatory compliance. To address these issues, LVBWB has been proposing the development of an integrated Client Permits Database equipped with an Early Alert System. This system aims to provide timely notifications on permit expirations, customer inactivity, overdue bills, and debt alerts, thereby enabling proactive management and improved decision-making. This challenge offers participants to develop a visualization solution that creates an interactive data platform (Dashboard) consolidating urban development and flood risk data for Mwanza city, enabling LVBWB to analyze spatial trends of urban expansion into flood-prone areas along the Mirongo River basin in Mwanza. LOCATION: Mwanza
Year: 2025

Location

  • Mwanza
Urban Resilience Index and Community Vulnerability
A comprehensive understanding is needed of decision-makers for Mwanza and Tanga cities where urban communities are most vulnerable to climate and water-related risks. While some neighborhoods have strong social networks and infrastructure, others face compound vulnerabilities from poverty, inadequate housing, poor drainage, and limited access to clean water. Without integrated tools to visualize social, economic, and environmental vulnerability factors together, resilience-building interventions are scattered and may miss the communities most in need of support. This challenge offers participants to develop a visualization solution that reveals community vulnerability patterns and resilience capacities, enabling targeted interventions and resource allocation to strengthen urban resilience where it's needed most.
Year: 2025

Location

  • Mwanza
  • Tanga
Climate-Resilient Urban Infrastructure Gap
Both Mwanza and Tanga face critical infrastructure deficits where rapidly growing populations lack access to climate-resilient water and sanitation services. In Mwanza's peri-urban areas and Tanga's informal settlements, residents rely on inadequate drainage systems that fail during heavy rains, leading to flooding and waterborne disease outbreaks. Urban planners struggle to prioritize infrastructure investments without clear visualization of where gaps are most severe and which areas would benefit most from climate-resilient upgrades. This results in ad-hoc infrastructure development that fails to address the most vulnerable communities. This challenge offers participants to develop a visualization solution that identifies and prioritizes urban infrastructure gaps, helping planners allocate resources effectively for climate-resilient infrastructure development in the most vulnerable communities.
Year: 2025

Location

  • Mwanza
  • Tanga
Urban Growth and Flood Risk Intersection
In Mwanza and Tanga, unplanned urban settlements are rapidly expanding into flood-prone areas without proper risk assessment. City planners lack clear visibility of where new developments overlap with historical flood zones, leading to construction in high-risk areas along the Mirongo River in Mwanza and coastal lowlands in Tanga. This creates a dangerous cycle where urbanization increases flood vulnerability while putting more people and infrastructure at risk. The absence of integrated mapping tools that show the relationship between urban growth patterns and flood exposure prevents evidence-based land use planning and early intervention in vulnerable areas. This challenge offers participants to develop a visualization solution that helps city planners and decision-makers understand the intersection between rapid urban growth and flood vulnerability, enabling evidence-based land use planning and risk-informed development decisions.
Year: 2025

Location

  • Mwanza
  • Tanga

Skills development | Work with data sets | open-access learning materials | Research and Innovation

List of Challenges used:

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Transforming Data into Actionable Insights for Lake Victoria Basin Water Board (LVBWB), Mwanza City

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Urban Resilience Index and Community Vulnerability

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Climate-Resilient Urban Infrastructure Gap

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Urban Growth and Flood Risk Intersection

Developed Solutions

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Transforming Data into Actionable Insights for Lake Victoria Basin Water Board (LVBWB), Mwanza City

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Urban Resilience Index and Community Vulnerability

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Climate-Resilient Urban Infrastructure Gap

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Urban Growth and Flood Risk Intersection

Dar es Salaam

Communicate risks and hazards to local communities via visualisations

Dar es Salaam

Story of past floods for better situation analysis

Experts

IMG_5032-topaz-sharpen-face-upscale-3.3x
Zahor-K.-Zahor_team-scaled
Antero-Jarvi_team-scaled
Amedeus
Ms.-Theofrida-Julius
Massoud-Hamad_team-scaled
Msilikale-Msilanga_team-scaled
NiinaKayhko_utu
Dr. Mbise_
View All Team

Partners

Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit
Official Website
Government Institutions
Official Website

General Guidelines

Data Visualisation Challenge is an opportunity for students and young professionals to turn raw data into powerful visualization solutions that highlight climate risks and urban resilience. By working with open datasets and user-friendly tools, participants will learn how to transform information into maps, charts, and interactive visuals that can support better decision-making. The challenge encourages creativity, collaboration, and the use of open-source technologies, while building practical skills that are highly relevant in today’s data-driven world.

Geospatial Data

All the data can be downloaded from the Climate Risk Database. Or you can contact your mentors from the University partners who can help you on how to get the needed data.

Preferred Softwares

Under this visualisation challenge, you are allowed to  use any open source softwares to make your visualisation. Here we list few softwares: Data Studio, Leaflet, Mapbox, Quantum GIS, Geonode, U Map, and or Open Refine.

General Documents and data repositories

  1. Tanzania Urban Resilience Program Annual Report (.pdf).
  2. Ramani Huria Website:
  3. Ramani Huria 1.0 Atlas:
  4. OpenStreetMap: (The data here can be downloaded using export tools: you need to have OpenStreetMap account)
  5. Climate Risk Database for Resilience Academy Website:

Do you want to ask a question?

If you have any question about Resilience Academy Data Visualization Challenge, feel free to contact us through our Contact Us Page

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