2016 ICT4D Conference

Tanzania National Parks (TANAPA) Geographical Information Systems (GIS) Unit was established in 2012, with the full support of the organization's budget in order to support day to day park operations and improve field outcomes, especially those related to anti-poaching operations and reporting. Under this framework, TANAPA has a fully equipped Standard ARCGIS for Server Enterprise, which is presumably supposed to serve all of its sixteen parks located in various ecosystems within the country, ranging from savannas, mountainous forests, flood plains, aquatic/lakes and marine environment
The ArcGIS Server is centrally located at TANAPA Headquarters, where it is supposed to link/sync directly from field back and forth to the Server, providing near/real time reports (data) to park managers from park rangers working in the field. The near/real time data will improve law enforcement operations outcomes by providing accurate and timely reports (data) to park managers who are not necessarily in the same spot/field locations all the time as park rangers
TANAPA's GIS Unit envisions a future state where geospatial data from all of Tanzania's national parks is managed centrally and published to dashboards in order to automate consuming report creation processes and enable self-service "just-in-time" management access and decision making for improved fields operations outcomes. In so doing, management dashboards will serve TANAPA executives by providing daily and timely reports from each of the sixteen park's at the palms of their hands while contributing to the overall organization efficiency. This paper outlines outcomes/achievement within TANAPA in using GIS technologies while pin pointing some key challenges encountered in the process