Developing Twaamtaro (Adopt a Drain)
Twaamtaro Tanzania
Online platform that tracks local drain cleanliness & information on solid waste deposits. Inspired by Adopt a Drain from Code for America!.
Background
Waste cleanness in Dar es salaam drains is rarely done, and when it is done, there is lack of dissemination of the work and drains status to respective leaders and stakeholders. There is always a need to raise community engagement in drains cleaning and to find innovative ways that can enable provision of reports on drains cleaness to the community.
Leverage
Community mapping project ‘ramani huria’ has collected the available data on the drainage network. These are available and can be found on openstreetmap, these data shows that the network has not covered the large part of the city and from different reports it is not frequently maintained in the areas it has covered. More details can be found here
Building on this work, arrangements were made to organize the community to frequently clean these drains so as to help water flow especially on flood prone areas, this went in parallel with development of application to monitor, store and show drains information called Twaa mtaro (Adopt a drain).
Twaamtaro as a platform enables the community to report about cleaness activities that are done on drains, it does this by letting users send drains information through SMS, USSD and WEB, this enables even the average citizen who does not have access to the Internet to be able to use the platform.
The workflow is citizen are assigned drains by the street leaders, they receive SMS notification from the platform, when the finish cleaning they can send SMS or use USSD or login into the online twaamtaro site and update the status of their drains.
Twaamtaro in action
Me presenting Twaamtaro to World Bank Tanzania Staffs
