Program Overview

Program Overview

The overarching goal of the Tanzania iWASH Program is to support sustainable, market-driven water supply, sanitation, and hygiene services to improve health and increase eco-nomic resiliency of the poor in targeted rural areas and small towns within an integrated wa-ter resource management framework. To achieve this goal, the program has five specific objectives:

Objective 1 : Increase sustainable access to water supply by poor rural and small town dwellers. iWASH takes a holistic perspective in assessing and meeting community and household water needs through a Multiple-Use Services (MUS) approach. This approach aims to understand and address the different water use needs that face both communities and households, and the supply options for meeting these needs.

Objective 2 : Increase sustainable access to sanitation and hygiene services by poor rural and small town dwellers. iWASH partners adopt a hybrid approach—drawing on experience from Community Led Total Sanitation (CLTS), Participatory Hygiene and Sanitation Trans-formation (PHAST), and more market oriented approaches—to motivate and empower communities, individual households, and schools to improve their access to adequate sanita-tion and hygiene services.

Objective 3 : Increase the number and capacity of private sector entrepreneurs and busi-nesses providing WASH services. Tanzania iWASH partners facilitate and promote the es-sential role of the private sector in provision of water, sanitation, and hygiene hardware by identifying the constraints to and opportunities for effective local private sector involvement, and then working with the private sector to lessen these constraints.

Objective 4 : Increase access to sustainable financing for communities and entrepreneurs engaged in WASH services. Tanzania iWASH activities build on CARE Tanzania’s well-established Village Savings and Loans experiences in Tanzania, while promoting the con-cept of local investment in water, sanitation and hygiene, especially sanitation at the house-hold level.

Objective 5 : Increase sustainable management of watersheds and water resources quantity and quality. Tanzania iWASH is implemented in a water resource management framework, aiming to understand, conserve and sustain water resources and ecosystems upon which human populations depend.

Contact Information

Contact Information

Email: tanzania@globalwaters.net

Digital Atlas

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Benefits and challenges of visualizing spatial data for IWRMVisualizing spatial data such as rainfall, river discharge and the location of water users in the form of maps is essential for effective water resources management. Maps illustrate spatial patterns not evident in tabular data. Yet maps on paper are static and at a fixed scale. Geographic Information System (GIS) can help analyze and display data. However, in developing countries, there are several constraints facing the widespread adoption and continued upgrading of GIS software with time, such as:

  • ArcGIS, the industry standard in spatial analysis is expensive
  • Cannot be freely installed on any number of computers
  • Open Source GIS has a steep learning curve, and there is a dearth of technical trainers
  • Internet connectivity is very patchy and slow
  • A Digital Atlas has been developed by GLOWS and Tanzania iWASH over 2013-2014 using the open source atlas publishing software GeoPublisher. The Atlas contains a wide variety of data relevant to water resources management that can be used by a person with no GIS knowledge nor any internet connection needed. Most of the data has been provided by the Wami Ruvu Basin Water Office with additional sources such as MODIS data (NASA/University of Montana), ClimateWizard, Google Earth Engine, Tanzania National Bureau of Statistics and IUCN.

    What the Digital Atlas is:

    A geospatial Information gateway on all sectors connected with water resources (Figure 1): topographic, erosion vulnerability, geological, climate, ecosystem, surface and groundwater resources, monitoring wells and hydrologic data, water use permit locations, public health, administrative, demographic and infrastructure. In addition, a literature section includes a collection of relevant publications for the Wami/Ruvu basin.

    Digital Atlas Features at a glance:

  • No internet connection necessary to run Atlas
  • Atlas can be installed on any operating system as a self- contained set of vector/raster data and Java environment files.
  • This set of folders is portable and can be transferred using a CD, external memory or stored on the web.
  • Information for each thematic map are displayed as layers ; The user can change colour, symbols, size and filter data for each layer to create custom maps that can be saved as images.
  • Ability to zoom into a map, access information pertinent to a particular site and combine different layers of data without the need of a GIS.
  • Can combine different layers for analysis of linkages, eg. Between evapotranspiration and land cover, or between rainfall and discharge.
  • From the field to the user's screen:

    The process of Atlas development Spatial data (whether hydrological, ecological, water use or demographic) is collected and used to make shapefiles (data geo-referenced with geographic coordinates) through GIS. The shapefiles are then imported into the Digital Atlas as layers (Figure 3). Ready-to-use shapefiles are also available from other sources, both from Tanzania and internationally. The Atlas is then saved and exported as a data-driven executable. Updates to the Atlas are possible by developers such as hydrologists and technicians in the Basin Water Office with knowledge of GIS and a basic understanding of GeoPublisher that can be acquired in one day.

    Atlas development steps

    Digital Atlas - A universal tool:

    The Digital Atlas can be utilized by a wide variety of users engaged with water resources management such as water resources planners, managers, government policy/decision makers, hydrologists and scientists who can readily access and analyze the data by just referring to the accompanying User Manual. The Atlas can also be utilized as a tool by educational institutions, community organizations and think-tanks to demonstrate linkages between geophysical, ecological, anthropogenic, administrative and infrastructural factors that influence the availability and management of water. The open source, platform independent Atlas has the potential to be widely used as a demonstrative and analytical tool for facilitating sustainable water resources management.


    Wami Ruvu Basin Digital Atlas User Guide

    Download the Digital Atlas Here (490MB)

    Contact Us email

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