2021-11-19 –, Room 2
Language: English
This talk is based on the experiences from the Resilience Academy project in Tanzania, where students are engaged in a mass-internship program for a period of 8-12 weeks. The student internship model of the Resilience Academy is designed to work with the local organisations to conduct geospatial data collection campaigns based on the use of various open-source data and tools combined with community mapping and digital online working. Simultaneously, students’ exposure to practical training during the internship provides them with relevant applied geospatial skills, which increase their future employment opportunities and participation in informed decision-making.
Urbanization challenges Africa’s young labour force, which needs to be skilled to solve problems caused by unplanned urbanization. Looking to many African cities, urbanization challenges is increasing over the past years that lead to increased urban disasters among other challenges such as Flooding (Bapari, Haque et al. 2016). Due to the increase of these challenges, local skills for solving these challenges is needed in order to be able to find a solution during the rise of these challenges.
Provision of skills to young university students is currently based on the basic university curriculum training that is not necessarily looking on the current urban challenges. Hence there is no long-term sustainability to using the local skills to finding urban solutions. Young, graduated experts need to be able to steer urbanization to sustainable trajectories with digital skills of geospatial data and technologies, which enable urban transformation. Therefore, this is a major opportunity for African universities and their students’ future employment.
Msilikale Msilikale is a former student of Ramani Tandale project in 2011 which is one of the original World Bank pilot projects for community mapping using OpenStreetMap. Msilikale has acquired more experiences since then by organizing Mapathons, training university students and other OSM communities using OSM tools. However, his background is in Geospatial, urban planning, and community mapping. Msilikale has been working with World Bank and other partners after his Masters. Now he is working as a project coordinator to deliver resilience academy programs for Mass internship program, e-learning materials development, research and geospatial climate risk database.