Jipange: Empowering local Tanzanian authorities to reduce flood risk

Dar es Salaam is in the eastern Tanzania. It is the country's largest city, with about 4.3 million inhabitants and affected by flooding in almost every rainy season, affecting lives and livelihoods, destroying infrastructure, and causing food insecurity and health problems.

The Dar es Salaam flooding problem is exacerbated by uncontrolled urbanization characterized by informal settlements. Moreover, floods have greater impacts on communities with lower economic background, as it leaves these even more vulnerable than before the floods.

‘Jipange Project’ is part of World Bank's Tanzania Urban Resilience Programme (TURP) with the objective of “building and strengthening urban resilience to current climate variability and future climate change in Tanzania’s cities and towns”. The project aims to strengthen disaster preparedness and response capacity of 12 Ward Disaster Management Committees (WDMCs) through training and capacity development and to strengthen community resilience by supporting them to develop Disaster Risk Reduction Plans (DRRPs) and Disaster Preparedness and Response Plans (DPRPs).

Toolkit: A step-by-step guideline document to enable the ward committees to develop their own DPRPs and DRRPs.

The content of the Toolkit familiarizes the WDMC members with the basic concepts of disaster risk management. At the same time, it helps them with understanding of:

• existing disaster management practices in their ward;
• identifying flood risks in their ward;
• selecting flood risk reduction measures;
• preparing essential resources for better preparedness and response during flood events.

With an idea to sustain the knowledge locally, the project used a ‘Training of trainer’ approach. The training materials were developed based on the Toolkit. Initially, a pool of volunteers, ‘master trainers’, from the Tanzania Red Cross Society were trained on the Toolkit. These ‘master trainers’, under the supervision of the project team, subsequently trained members of the WDMCs from the 12 selected project wards and facilitated the WDMC members to develop the DPRPs and DRRPs for their own wards.

The project successfully ended in May 2021 with a hand-over ceremony aiming to build momentum and to ensure the developed documents are adopted and endorsed by key stakeholders at National, Regional, City, Municipal and Ward Level.

During the ceremony, the developed plans were endorsed by the Dar es Salaam Regional Administrative Secretary and were handed to the WDMCs. Each WDMCs were also provided with a set of useful equipment for emergency response (gumboots, life vests, stretcher, torches, first aid kit, megaphones, rake and forks and spades).

The prepared toolkit is applicable to any other ward in Tanzania. With some adjustments, the toolkit can be used by the local authorities to prepare their disaster risk reduction plan and preparedness and response plan.