By Rand Pearson
Imagine sitting on your phone during the up-coming Kenya elections and looking at an application mapping voting wards and districts; within each district map are the candidates running for office; click on the candidate and a profile pops up with every detail imaginable on that person, including financial records, wealth declaration forms, previous voting records and performance on national budgetary matters (to name a few items).
Sounds far fetched, right? Kenyans with that kind of data and information at their fingertips? Impossible.
Not for the group of open data advocates at Code For Kenya, and particularly not for its Country Lead, former Star journalist and Knight International Fellow, Catherine Gicheru.
“Something that would be extremely useful would be the wealth declaration form, for example,” says Gicheru. “I think the public needs to know you started with zero and now you’re now a multi-millionaire. How did you make your money? Yet we know you’ve just been a cop for the last five years, or you’re an MP or whatever it is. How do you get rid of corruption if you don’t make public certain kind of information?”
This is just the kind of data that Code For Kenya is hoping will help give the power back to the people. Though instant corruption busting data may still be a pipedream to many, the local and international network of partners that stand with Code For Kenya are hoping to open Kenya, one byte at a time.
Open Data Movement Comes to Kenya
In July 2011, President Mwai Kibaki launched the Kenya Open Data Initiative through the ICT Development Authority, making key government data such as the 2009 census, national and regional expenditure and information on key public services freely available to the public through a single online portal, which has now evolved into Opendata.co.ke.
According to Open Data Kenya, we’re the first developing country to have an open government data portal, the first in sub-Saharan Africa and second on the continent after Morocco. The initiative has been widely acclaimed globally as one of the most significant steps Kenya has made to improve governance and implement the new Constitution’s provisions on access to information.
For the first time in its history, Kenya has released budget data through the Open Budget App (available at budget.opendata.go.ke).
In an act that seems to underscore what Kibaki started in 2011, just last month the President signed into law the “Access to Information” bill. In a follow-up speech, the President said it was the right of every Kenyan to query the government for information and that it was the government’s obligation in return to honour those requests.
The new mandate seems to empower the citizenry to walk into any public, government office and demand data. But this being Kenya, the practicalities of implementing this directive at the “ground level” will be a long, arduous journey.
The Open Data Barometer released earlier this year had little to commemorate about the open data movement in Africa. That said, Kenya was in the top five of most open countries in Africa, but 42nd in the world. Sadly, there really are no truly open data countries in Africa to which we can compare ourselves.
This is what Code 4 Kenya is hoping to change.
‘Data Can Be Revolutionary’
Launched in 2012, Code For Kenya is part of the larger group Code For Africa, which includes Code groups for larger regions such as Code For Nigeria.
The initial funding was from World Bank to help close the gap in release of data on the Kenya Open Data Initiative portal and its use by media and other organisations. Then it got additional funding from Omidyar to expand to different countries forming the umbrella Code for Africa programme.
Gicheru’s position is funded by a fellowship from the International Centre for Journalists. According to her, while there is a lot of information available to the public, it lacks timeliness and meaning.
“Information is only as good as its usefulness—in the sense that it is addressing issues of concern,” says Gicheru. “One thing Kenya is good for is publishing a lot of information; I wouldn’t say data per se, but there’s data available on certain things especially on health and on budget. There’s very little, for instance, on tenders.”
One good example of this is the budgetary map of Kenya (see inset). Here we can see monies spent or designated to generically named projects, but there is much more in what we don’t see (i.e. how the money was actually spent, performance reports, contractors involved—basically where the money actually goes and the measurement of its impact.)
“For instance you can find out which tenders are being advertised, but you don’t know the awards, you know. So, we give a little [information] but not too much,” says Gicheru. “There’s a bit of holding back, then there’s also the timeliness of that information—such as the budget. The budgeting information we have is from FY 2014/2015; they haven’t started 2015/16, so we’re two years behind. So we’re always working on two years, so there’s that lack (of information) in terms of certain data that is available.”
As we go into an election next year, accountability has never been more important. As it stands, if you the voting populace wanted to gauge any candidate on their budgetary performance or failures, you still don’t have all the up to date information to which you could hold them to task.
“Also remember the revolution will not happen if there’s no change within government attitude,” Gicheru adds. “As long as official secrets exist there’s no civil servant who will wake up in the morning and give me information I ask for even though I’m entitled to get that information, even though it’s supposed to be public information.”
Muckraking Newsrooms and the Future of Data Journalism
So data by itself is not necessarily revolutionary unless it has a filter of meaning. For instance, how much are we spending on roads; which roads exactly have been planned; why is the government building new health centres (for whom and why).
“Instead of providing nurses and doctors to the community, why is the ‘Managing Medical Equipment Programme’ being funded so much, yet we don’t even have the personnel?” Says Gicheru. “Those kinds of questions that people need to be able to answer. That information is not easily accessible and for journalists to report and bring these stories to light is an even more difficult task.”
That’s where Code For Kenya is working to close the gaps in data and help the public make sense of the information they are receiving.
One such example of this is the initial project that launched the Code group, “Dodgy Doctors” helping people to make clear and informed decisions about doctors—the worse case being the story of the fake doctor in Nakuru who held a practice for six years with a counterfeit license.
Launched with The Star in 2012 “Dodgy Doctors” is a clearing-house for officially registered doctors and patient feedback. Once the public caught on, the feedback and use of this data was enormous.
Apart from informing citizens, Code For Kenya through a network of affiliate media partners is also empowering journalists to expose stories that are serious game changers for injustice and corruption.
To this end, Code For Africa is a resource partner for ANCIR and its affiliate, Afrileaks, a repository of African based information leaks across the continent. ANCIR is a network of Africa’s best muckraking newsrooms, collaborating on cross-border investigations and who pool their resources to build the technologies and expertise necessary to beat organized crime and corruption.
It is the organization that built the Africa connection to the Panama Papers exposing local leaders who had built tax havens in offshore accounts. It has also used a massive data driven journalistic effort to expose mafia ties to Africa. And it is this type of information and reporting that demonstrates how data can help democratize traditionally closed-press African societies.
“The way it works,” says Gicheru, “is that somebody who is interested in doing a story like Goldenberg, for instance, is that they can actually use local media houses or local journalists or specific journalists within different countries to be able to do that. The thing with that is that you may not be able to have the expertise or the resources to be able to conduct investigations. ANCIR can actually provide you with the expertise and or the resources to be able to do those kinds of investigations that you want to do, so in a way the umbrella body of anyone who wants to do investigations, but at the same time it also provides support in technique, expertise and resource.”
This expertise and resource is coming to Kenya in a big way through a new $500,000 data journalism fund called impactAFRICA. impactAFRICA is the continent’s largest fund for data-driven storytelling.
They offer support for pioneering data journalism and innovative reporting that tackles development issues, such as public healthcare, in six African countries: Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania and Zambia. The fund also provides for technology assistance from its civic labs in all six countries, as well as one-on-one editorial mentoring, digital skills training, and content syndication services.
Journalists can apply and submit pitches for funding through impactAFRICA’s website and the cut off is November 11. The fund and the initiative to push data driven journalism is intended to spur newsroom experimentation and innovative storytelling, while also encouraging more evidence-based public discourse.
“Open data means being able to know to ask questions and get answers; being able to interrogate those questions. That’s a change - it means people are no longer just complaining, you give them information to challenge what they’ve been told. So, when people are sitting in barazas they have questions to ask. They know which questions to ask and they know where to direct their anger or who should address those questions they have,” says Gicheru.
Though still in its infancy, this, it seems, would be the Open Data Movement in Kenya.
