GeoforAll community welcomes Msilikale Msilanga as our GeoForAll-Africa chair. Msilikale Msilanga is a spatial planner professional from Tanzania and have experiences from Europe and Latin America based on the same field. He has been working at the World Bank since 2011 as the Geospatial consultant before he went to have his Masters for two years. Now he is back at the World Bank supporting the open data team and more mapping projects in Tanzania. For more than five years, he has been working with the local communities in Dar es salaam helping them to map their own areas using OSM. Through these maps which are mostly in the informal settlements, more issues facing the community has been identified and more projects have been identified one of them being Ramani Huria.[1] He served as the co-chair of the very successful FOSS4G 2018 in Dar es Salaam. [2]
GeoForAll community want to thank Professor Serena Coetzee, Rania Elsayed Ibrahim and Bridget Fleming for all the work they did as chairs for GeoForAll-Africa . Their leadership and commitment has been instrumental in helping us expand GeoforAll ideas in Africa. We started with nothing few years back . It was with Prof. Coetzee’s great leadership to establish the first Open Source Geospatial Lab in Africa at the University of Pretoria and the tireless work that helped us build the momentum across Africa. We will need their help and guidance for the future. Prof. Coetzee’s new leadership role and work for UN-OpenGIS [3] is very important for the whole world and we are looking forward for her leadership on this.
We are all looking forward to Msilikale leadership to expand GeoForAll and make sure everyone benefits from geoeducation and digital economy opportunities.
[1] https://techcamp.america.gov/bios/msilikale-msilanga/
