Comparative Study of Bachelor of Civil Engineering Curricula in Higher Learning Institutions in Tanzania: A Systematic Review

This paper compares the curricula of Bachelor degree in the field of civil engineering. This helps improving the quality of curriculum that generates demand driven engineering graduates with an equal competency in the context of labour market. Descriptive survey was adopted, and a checklist of courses from purposively selected higher learning institutions was used. Constant comparative analysis to categorize types of information investigated was adopted. Findings indicate that Bachelor degree programme in civil engineering at Dar es Salaam Institute of Technology (DIT), Mbeya University of Science and Technology (MUST) and St. Joseph College of Engineering and Technology (SJCET) has duration of 3 or 4 years depending on the entry qualification of the student, whereas at Arusha Technical College (ATC) it takes 3 years to complete the programme. On the other hand, inconsistency on the number of courses and academic loads offered in these institutions was revealed. The study suggests a joint development of curricula for training programmes. This could help trainers, researchers, curricula developers and policy makers to harmonize and minimize discrepancies of the curricula contents of the same programme offered in different institutions. Keywords: curricula, engineers, bachelor degree, civil engineering, institutions, Tanzania DOI: 10.7176/JEP/12-29-05 Publication date:October 31st 202

A Quantitative Groundwater Resource Management under Uncertainty Using a Retrospective Optimization Framework

Water resources are a major concern for any socio-economic development. As the quality of many surface fresh water sources increasingly deteriorate, more pressure is being imparted into groundwater aquifers. Since groundwater and the aquifers that host it are inherently vulnerable to anthropogenic impacts, there is a need for sustainable pumping strategies. However, groundwater resource management is challenging due to the heterogeneous nature of aquifer systems. Aquifer hydrogeology is highly uncertain, and thus it is imperative that this uncertainty is accounted for when managing groundwater resource pumping. This, therefore, underscores the need for an efficient optimization tool which can sustainably manage the resource under uncertainty conditions. In this paper, we apply a procedure which is new within the context of groundwater resource management—the Retrospective Optimization Approximation (ROA) method. This method is capable of designing sustainable groundwater pumping strategies for aquifers which are characterized by uncertainty arising due to scarcity of input data. ROA framework solves and evaluates a sequence of optimization sub-problems in an increasing number of realizations. We used k-means clustering sampling technique for the realizations selection. The methodology is demonstrated through application to an hypothetical example. The optimization problem was solved and analyzed using “Active Set” algorithm implemented under MATLAB environment. The results indicate that the ROA sampling based method is a promising approach for optimizing groundwater pumping rates under conditions of hydrogeological uncertainty