Dar es Salaam, the primary city of Tanzania is highly vulnerable to flooding even from minor Storms, floods in 2009, 2011, 2014 and 2015, caused loss of life,injury, and severely impacted diverse sectors. Dar es Salaam’s flooding problems are largely a function of inadequate storm drainage and poor waste disposal practices rather than being driven exclusively by only extreme rainfall.
To reduce flood risk through improved management of drain infrastructure The World Bank Tanzania funded the development of a flood risk monitoring system(Twaa Mtaro) to engage communities in drain clean ups, to facilitate community reporting on blockages affecting the flood risk of local drainage systems and provide municipalities with relevant data related to drain cleaning activities.
The development of Twaa Mtato as a web application started May 2017 however the initial co-debase was forked from Chicago-based website for collecting and displaying resident submissions around snow emergencies called adopt-sidewalk. Twaa Mtaro core is based on ruby on rails, uses postgres/postgis for data storage and leaflet for map visualization, all geospatial data(drains data) was prepared using QGIS.