Tanzania is a
country of declining poverty lines and income disparity with high development
potential economically and socially. Rapid economic growth, rising middleclass,
and growing access to mobile technology has made East-Africa desirable new
market for geospatial solutions. At the same time, countries face severe
development challenges in land management, urbanization and loss of natural
resources, to mention a few. It will be crucial how Tanzania is be able to use
digitalization and economic growth potential towards sustainable management of
the country, and geospatial solutions play an important role in this
development. As a cooperation between four Tanzanian universities and
University of Turku from Finland, we organized a survey in targeted to
Tanzanian geospatial experts so that we can better understand the current
expertise of the actors, their cooperation networks and visions for the
development potential. The survey collected 75 answers and these show that the
geospatial actor network is rather juvenile in Tanzania. Most of the
respondents have been active in the field between 3-5 years. However experts
come from wide range of public and private organizations and NGO’s and are most
active in geospatial data management and analysis, and training related
activities. Private sector consists of few key companies, whose expertize is
not yet specialized. Actors identify several positive signs for the
development, such as growing number of experts, access to data and technology
and increasing investments. At the same time, many challenges are confronted
from lack of coordination and infrastructures to lack of understanding of the
geospatial sector importance.