Mapping paradise
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 22 January 2020
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Katie Prescott revisits the efforts of the Zanzibar government to chart its territory by flying drones across the African spice island.
A year ago she met planning minister Mohammed Juma, the brains behind this ambitious project that aims to clarify land property rights, provide information to local residents about the location of services and amenities, and help the government plan everything from flood management to urban redevelopment.
Katie catches up with Edward Anderson of the World Bank, who headed up the drone mapping project, to find out how the data they have gathered is now being crunched by artificial intelligence algorithms, and being made available to the public.
Producer: Sarah Treanor
(Picture: Aerial view of Zanzibar beach; Credit: den-belitsky/Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to Business Daily on the BBC World Service. I'm Katie Prescott. |
| 0:07.6 | Today I'll be revisiting a program that we ran a year ago when producer Sarah Trinor and I spent a few |
| 0:13.8 | days in Stonetown, the heart of Zanzibar, just off the coast of mainland Tanzania. |
| 0:19.5 | We went to Zanzibar, better known for spices and for tourism than for technology, |
| 0:24.4 | because of a pioneering mapping project. |
| 0:27.5 | Zanzibar made look like a holiday maker's dream, |
| 0:30.7 | but it's facing the same urbanisation challenges that the rest of East Africa is. |
| 0:36.0 | Unplanned settlements and a population increasing far faster |
| 0:39.7 | than it's possible to keep pace with in terms of infrastructure and housing development. |
| 0:44.9 | It also faces flooding and diseases like cholera spike during the rainy season in Zanzibar's |
| 0:51.1 | densely populated areas. |
| 0:59.1 | Africa is largely still unmapped to anything like the detail that Europe has, |
| 1:02.5 | and traditional mapping methods are prohibitively expensive. |
| 1:06.2 | Without proper maps, planning had been all but impossible, |
| 1:09.9 | as we heard from Dr. Mohamed Juma, the planning minister. |
| 1:15.1 | He teamed up with Edward Anderson of the World Bank to launch drone mapping, |
| 1:18.7 | which not only gave him up-to-date cheap to produce maps, |
| 1:23.0 | but created teams of skilled drone pilots on the Spice Islands. |
| 1:27.2 | We'll hear what happened next with some updates at the end of the program. |
| 1:29.0 | We hope you enjoy it. |
| 1:32.6 | Think of Zanzibar and what springs to mind. |
| 1:38.3 | Honeymoons, spices maybe, tropical heat or centuries of history and tradition. |
... |
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