Data-Driven Solutions for Sustainable Cities

2020

This visualization challenge unites emerging data scientists, urban planners, and environmental advocates to address urgent urban resilience issues in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, focusing on urban environmental management, infrastructure resilience, and integrated urban planning.

Participants gain hands-on experience transforming complex geospatial datasets from partners like the World Bank and local initiatives into impactful visualizations that support sustainable development and climate adaptation. The event hones technical skills in geospatial analysis, multi-layered visualization, and interactive dashboard design while deepening domain knowledge in urban environmental science, infrastructure assessment, and evidence-based planning.

Working collaboratively, teams develop innovative solutions that reveal connections across urban forestry, drainage systems, and planning, ultimately creating actionable insights to enhance urban resilience and inform decision-making for cities in East Africa and beyond.

Location:

Dar es Salaam

Challenge descriptions:

Visualizing drainage bottleneck locations.
Accumulated sediment and solid waste can easily result in blockage of important drains. Through Ramani Huria and Resilience Academy, drainage impediments have been mapped and can be updates throughout the season. At impediment locations, typically dimensions of the blocked drain as well as the type and severity of blockage is known (0%-50%-100% blocked). To make these data more actionable, it would help to understand whether this blocked drain imposes a serious threat on the surroundings. This is, besides the already known parameters (dimensions and severity of blockage)
Year: 2020
Location: Dar es Salaam
Integration of different type of data to identify challenges through urban planning
Urban Planning is challenging when data is not harmonized together to identify common solution for Urbanized cities. Through Ramani Huria and Resilience Academy, many featured data have been collected in Dar es Salaam that in general show the flood and resilience challenges. In this visualization challenge, you find a way to harmonize the data together in order to identify the urban challenge. So, you will start by selecting the data and identify the challenges using different analysis.
Year: 2020
Location: Dar es Salaam
Visualization of urban tree distributions and its importance for urban forestry management.
Understanding the relationship in the urban environmental landscape is important such as urban heat stress, green areas, flooding and soil erosion with other. Because of this, the World Bank has piloted a tree mapping project in Dar es Salaam in order to evaluate different methodologies of analysing urban greenery and trees in the city. The result aimed to contribute to 1. improved management and planning of urban greenery, trees and green spaces, 2. Clear ways to protecting city’s remaining trees and planning where to put more tree in the city, 3. Identification of overall green cover quality of the city.
Year: 2020
Location: Dar es Salaam

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

202+

Young people participated

26+

Geospatial Data Used

List of Challenges used:

Dar es Salaam

Visualizing drainage bottleneck locations.

Dar es Salaam

Integration of different type of data to identify challenges through urban planning

Dar es Salaam

Visualization of urban tree distributions and its importance for urban forestry management.

Developed Solutions

Dar es Salaam

Communicate risks and hazards to local communities via visualisations

Dar es Salaam

Story of past floods for better situation analysis

Dar es Salaam

Solid waste collection plan for Tanzanian cities

Dar es Salaam

Visualizing drainage bottleneck locations.

Dar es Salaam

Integration of different type of data to identify challenges through urban planning

Dar es Salaam

Visualization of urban tree distributions and its importance for urban forestry management.

Partners

The World Bank
Government Institutions

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 StudioLeafletMapboxQuantum GISGeonodeU 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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