Open Cities Africa : Program of the GFDRR Open Data for Resilience Initiative

As urban populations grow and their vulnerability increases, managing urban growth in a way that fosters cities’ resilience to natural hazards and the impacts of climate change becomes an ever-greater challenge that requires detailed, up-to date geographic data of the built environment. Addressing this challenge requires innovative, open, and dynamic data collection and mapping processes that support management of urban growth and disaster risk. Open Cities was first launched by the Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery’s Open Data for Resilience Initiative (OpenDRI) in South Asia in 2014. In 2017 OpenDRI took the Open Cities model and tailor it to Africa. Open Cities Africa was designed to result in the development of new disaster risk data, with new tools/products to explore it, increased capacity among local populations, and new partnerships among diverse stakeholders. Open Cities Africa was implemented in four distinct phases. A description of each phase and its associated deliverables is covered in this report.