Under the Geo-ICT project which is coordinated from the University of Turku in Finland, Universities in Tanzania such as SUA, SUZA, UDSM and ARU are working together to learn and share ideas. Part of the function of the project is to provide capacity building to trainers which is shared from within the University Network between Tanzania and Finland. From September, there is a team of young professionals who have visited the University of Turku from the four universities in order to learn and get support for their future studies as well as to prepare training materials when they get back to their respective universities. The team will stay until the end of November 2018.
On the other hand, from May this year, I was lucky to join the great team at University of Turku in the Geography and Geology Department to coordinate the Geo-ICT project and conduct training to the young professionals who came in Finland from SUA, SUZA, UDSM, and ARU. Many trainings have been done to the group such as remote sensing, geospatial analysis, pedagogical practices, etc, but my task was to conduct training on Participatory Mapping/Community Mapping, Geospatial Visualisation such as GeoNode as well as teaching the use open source tools especially the use of ODK for data collection. Furthermore, the use of simple codes has been shown in order to install Server which works with ODK.
Finally, I came to realize that transferring knowledge is something which do not only helping the trainee to learn but also the trainers. Now that there is many experiences from different projects, innovation and technologies especially from the fast-growing city like Dar es Salaam, knowledge through Universities could help to transfer all the experiences and knowledge to the students. If the teacher is well equipped with knowledge, the future decision makers who are currently students will also be equipped from the knowledge and experiences which have been collected.
I find this University Network very useful.
