Open Data How Kenya Did It

www.opendata.go.ke

@KenyaOpenData

By Former Project Coordinator: Kenya Open Data Initiative Kenya Open Government Partnership Blogger at datascience.co.ke @g33kmate

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Open Data How Kenya Did It

Introduction
Open Data has become a very popular phenomenon around the world. With an army of supporters behind it, the idea has also faced its rounds of questions and resistance within industry with culture, legislation, bureaucracy, and other human forces also getting in the way of what is/should be happening. Open Data is a more complicated science that is moving towards understanding how data can be shared on technology platforms to people who can easily make sense of it so as to influence their processes of decision-making, resource allocation and accountability Out of data, data analysis; business intelligence; governance; accountability etc. can effectively take place. Making this data open, though, gives an opportunity to many more players within and without the distributing institutions to benefit from the availability of that data hence the push for the global effort, Open Data. The former president of Kenya H.E President Mwai Kibaki launched the Kenya Open Data Initiative famously known as KODI on the 8th of June 2011. An initiative that had been attempted once before by the government in 2009 needed and took more of the dedication of a team that came from a mix of different backgrounds ranging from government, civil society, private sector, development partners and academia.

Background
Kenya has been an independent and sovereign country since 1963. Up until the signing in of the new constitution in 2010 that saw Kenya move into a more devolved system with county governments, Kenya has for a very long time been guided by a single government institution with the president being the most powerful symbol of national unity. The government exists in many government ministries each responsible for different aspects within government and providing services within the country. For a very long time, the government agencies have been charged with the responsibility of collecting information and doing research all around the country that is focused on their main agenda within the ministries and this information lies entirely within those institutions. There have been two main problems inherent within various ministries: Lack of digital systems Data collection and storage within government has been conducted through paper-based processes. With the boom in the digital age within the Kenyan industry, the government has not been very actively accommodative of the digital age. There are many records through the years that need digitization but challenges like lack of

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funding, manpower and dedication have become the stumbling blocks. This, in return has made it very difficult to retrieve and share historical data in more user-friendly ways for distribution or use. This challenge also affects the effective enjoyment that comes with the benefits of using data for better decision-making and resource allocation. Bureaucracy Accessing information within government has been faced with a massive challenge of the bureaucracy of decision making trees that dictate that decisions are to be made by the most hard to reach officials. This has effectively ensured the existence of delayed decision-making and elevation to the power of dissemination of data to individuals who otherwise should have no business in standing in the way of data distribution. Information is power and those that have the knowledge that they are the gate passes to this information have effectively used this power to effect the data hugging syndrome that allows only a chosen few access to information that should rightfully belong to the majority. Working in Silos One of the biggest problems within the Kenyan Government and many other governments throughout the world is the fact that most ministries work in silos. No information sharing, collaboration or teamwork of any kind exists. In fact, most work in competition with each other. Ministers have been quoted saying that they do not have access to information within other government ministries/departments, even when this information should be housed within their ministries. What the lack of partnership within government has done is to make it difficult for the top decision makers to have a bigger picture of how projects should be done to save costs and reduce waste. If the ministry of agriculture communicated better with the ministry of environment, they would know what the weather conditions are like and what kinds of seeds and fertilizers to buy and what kind of advice to give to farmers. If the ministry of roads communicated better with the ministry of energy, we wouldnt see all the property loss, power blackouts, internet cuts etc. that happen during road expansions to name but a few simplistic examples.

Partnerships
The Kenya Open Data Initiative has been a partnership of three major players: -The Government of Kenya -The Private Sector -The Civil Societies

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Government The Government of Kenya through the Ministry of Information and communication working closely through the Kenya ICT board which has been the driver of the project since its inception worked to bring together partners who could bring a vast range of knowledge from various sectors to ensure that KODI covers and takes into consideration all the sectors that could benefit from the availability of government information. The Kenya ICT Board put together a group of task force members who were charged with the responsibility of making the main decisions for open data and popularizing KODI among the major stakeholders. Within the government there exists the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics (KNBS), which is a main organization responsible for collecting statistics in the country for and from various ministries and making them available. Traditionally, KNBS has been collection information and selling it to cover its financial obligation from the government through the statistical abstract with is a coarse grained provision of the statistics in the most high level form with very little detail of the data in the effort to make the abstract less bulky. The statistical abstract is the source of al major statistics by the government on all the numeric and tabular statistics the social, political, and economic indicators of the country. The most unbelievable thing, however, is the fact that this report is only available in its paperback version and no digital version exists or is distributed out of the bureau.

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Unlike counterparts in the Rwandese government (National Institute of Statistics of Rwanda (NISR)) who are now using Africas technology stronghold system of SMS to collect and disseminate national statistics KNBS still has a bit of way to go in this fronts. The World Bank Kenya office as a key development partner to the government was and still is very instrumental in making KODI happen. With a team of economists and data curators, the Government of Kenya received an enormous amount of help not just financially but through a dedicated source of manpower and knowledge sharing. Through the bank, KODI got international acclamation and recognition and also through the support of various activities around KODI through external partners in the application development space. Out of the government, the World Bank has invested in Ideas that have seen the growing use of KODI within the Kenyan technology ecosystem and a push as well to have more digital systems that enable easy and free access of the information, visuals and analytics that come out of the initiative. Many other government departments have been cooperative in terms of providing data and guidance on how the KODI team would be able to effectively be a point of dissemination for the various statistics that are available. The government and its development partners play a key role in ensuring constant supply of data in formats that are easily accessible to the common people who want to use this data directly or indirectly to benefit their way of life. Private Sector Google played a very key role during the inception of the idea of a possible government portal that hosted data. Providing a team of managers and visualization tools that helped in the representation of the available data in more human readable formats. A range of training activities was also conducted to bring people up to speed on the use and manipulation of the available data for economic and social gain and here Google played a lead role of organizing activities that enhanced knowledge sharing, acceptance and great positive uptake of the initiative. Over the months, private sector organizations like Microsoft have also come in to sponsor the training and development of tools around the KODI initiative. Through the Innovate for Good price challenge, Microsoft Kenya is geared to start a challenge for application developers to get involved and engaged in the open data initiative through a training program, mentorship and application development. The media has been a key catalyst of the propagation to popularity of the initiative. With both positive and negative stories running in the various media channels, Kenyans have been informed of the progress of the initiative just as they have on the stumbling blocks of the same. No publicity

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is bad publicity and the media has been a very important partner as they have the greatest reach to citizens of all walks of life in the country. The ripple effect of the involvement of the private sector in KODI has not only been its great uptake within the Kenyan business and technology industry but the bigger picture of what is easily becoming the most talked about topic around the world today. Big Data. Through the availability of this subset of what could be a bigger picture of the data available, people in industry have a chance to start experiencing the benefits of data-based decision making, projection and predictive modeling. Many other private sector organizations have been involved and benefitted directly or indirectly from the initiative. Private sector plays a key role in open data when it comes to giving a commercialization angle of how to make monetary gains through the use of freely available data. This data can be used for effective business modeling, marketing, understanding demographics of potential business opportunities and predictive modeling. Civil Society During the launch of the KODI portal in 2011, President Mwai Kibaki, in his speech said, Data is the foundation of improving accountability and governance. There is need for someone within the initiative who has full contact with the interests of the common citizen and a full understanding of how information flow should work within the society and what its potential gain could be. This person is called the Civil Society. Through civil society, KODI stopped becoming a technology platform that disseminates information to citizen to a government platform that allows citizens to hold the government into account of its past activities and engagements through the data provided. Working with groups like AFRICOG, Development Initiatives, Twaweza, ICJ, SODNET, Article19; KODI is able to realize its full potential of a drive towards a more open government that upholds the key messages of reducing challenges of open governance that include: Improving public service Increasing public integrity More effectively managing public resources Through work with the civil society, Kenya successfully signed up as a member of the Open Government movement that saw the drafting of challenges and commitments that the government could make towards becoming more transparent, accountable and involving to its citizens I the processes of decision making and resource allocation.

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When information which properly belongs to the public is systematically withheld by those in power, the people soon become ignorant of their own affairs, distrustful of those who manage them, and eventually-incapable of determining their destinies." President Richard Nixon 1972

Legislation
In the Kenyan constitution, Article 35 has a section on Access to information that states: 35. (1) Every citizen has the right of access to (a) information held by the State; and (b) information held by another person and required for the exercise or protection of any right or fundamental freedom. (2) Every person has the right to the correction or deletion of untrue or misleading information that affects the person. (3) The State shall publish and publicize any important information affecting the nation.

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While this section of the constitution is very key to ensuring that every Kenyan citizen should enjoy and exercise the right to information; most Kenyan citizens do not have a clue about the availability of this section of the constitution in what is their fundamental rights. There have been arguments that the Kenyan citizen has no business being involved in matters of information and data as the great misconception is that access to information can only rely on access to technology and internet. Access to information is available in many other forms that include channels like the media and civil society. It is very essential for every Kenyan citizen to have access to information especially from the government, as this is a great source of information that helps in effective decision-making especially in agriculture, health, education, and business. The main challenge with the push towards access to information has been the lack of a Freedom of Information law that would enhance the existing smaller section of the constitution that makes a mention of the same. Government legislators have been working on developing these laws but to date, they only exist in draft format. Many other African Countries have these bills affecting the freedom of information in place but not many of these have made a move towards the existence of open data projects that allow free and easy access to government information. This goes to prove what might be the notion that for an effective open data movement, what you need might not be necessary or only great laws that make mention of these rights but in fact an engaged and organized community of dedicated individuals who would go over and beyond to ensure that the common citizen has access to information that will help them make more informed decisions regarding their lives for a better generation. All this notwithstanding, all the responsible bodies within government involved in legislation of these laws need to move with haste to ensure that the laws affecting the freedom of individuals in regards to accessing information are put well in place and prevent the consequences of the lack of it. Finances Unlike most government projects, Open Data is one of the least cost demanding projects I have come across. Open Data is about developing a portal that holds information, gathering information that is to be stored on this portal, developing a community around this information and managing activities around the working and output of the available data. The portal The KODI platform lies on a portal provided by Socrata, which is a USA, based technology company that provides open data and big data solutions & D&

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for companies and governments around the world. This portal is available on a commercial contract basis entered by the Government of Kenya and the technology company. There have been many questions raised as to why an open source solution or a Kenyan based solution was not used. Open Source There are a few open source products that exist for open data out there and as most open source projects, they require someone to understand the platform and to customize them to fit the needs of what was then KODI. This is not to say that no one could, but there had not been a proven record of these platforms handling data of this magnitude and given that this is a government project, trial and error is not a clear option of what should happen. Kenyan Solution What a lot of people might not know is that this project was very much done in less than 5 months, from the time it was Okayed to go ahead to possibly launch in June 2011. For any great software engineer out there, given the magnitude of the project, 5 months might not have been enough time to do all the necessary steps that are involved in effective software development taking into consideration the software development methods that also involve taking into account security, effective software testing, requirement elicitation, installation, training, government procurement; and all other process that would have made a successful portal. The community Financial requirements for developing a community around the Open Data movement lie mainly in training and user gatherings. The main communities that should be building around Open Data are: -industry players -students -citizens -application developers. These gatherings may be as much as an informal training session of how to use the platform both for download or upload of the data to the visualization of the data for better understanding and decision making. This can also involve breakfast meetings to discuss the progress and policies that need to be included within the running of the project. Project Management. Open Data being a more public engaging project needs management at various levels: 1. Project Coordinator/Manager this is an individual that has an overall outlook of the entire project and its elements. This kind of individual should have both technical and project/social management skills at a high level. 2. Technical person Given that the technicality of the portal is already managed by Socrata in a binding contract, the technical persons main mandate is to carry out requirements on the design of the portal and

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functionalities that need to be added in order to translate these in coordination with Socrata into new features of the portal. This person should also have analytical and GIS capabilities in order to visualize the available data into formats that are easily understandable by the community. 3. Data evangelist This is the communications person. The idea of Open Data might be known among the elite who have access to channels that allow access but there is a mass of citizens who should have access to this information but dont. The data evangelist works with partners like the media, both social and traditional media like newspapers, radio and TV to ensure a widespread message of the existence of this portal for all citizens. The data evangelist is also responsible for connecting the communities around open data with events and putting out messages of communication. 4. The taskforce This is a group of a good mix of industry players from private sector, civil society and government. A selection of up to six individuals who are charged with the responsibility of developing the policies around Open Data, popularizing the initiative within their various strongholds as well as keeping the team that works on the day to day running of the initiative in check.

The technology

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Data repository this is a database that contains all the datasets that have been uploaded. This data should always be available for all requests that are made through the frontend. This means that images of this database should be available just incase one fails; requests can be propagated to another. Active communication to the database should be through the frontend by authorized administrators. Frontend This is the web page that comes up when a user types in www.opendata.go.ke through the frontend, users are able to view the data available in graphical, tabular or GIS formats. This also allows users to make data requests or comments. The frontend is also the page available for the administrators to make changes to the available data, make comments, upload or bring down datasets. Representation - The data can be represented in three main formats: - Graphical allows for graphical representations of the distribution of the data. -Tabular this is the traditional row/column representation of data that may be hundreds of various indicators used during data collection. -GIS Some of the data available is location based. Schools, hospitals, development projects etc. all have location data to the latitude and longitude and hence can be represented on maps which is a great visual tool especially when trying to relay messages to show locational disparities in development or resource allocation.

Challenges
Lack complete of legislation. With this kind of legislation in place, it would be illegal for government institutions to hide information from citizens, as is the case right now. Matters like access to information should be inborn within people so that they know the importance of releasing information without any legal bounds. But due to the lack of this, there is a proposed FOI bill but since this is not law, there is nothing that binds any civil servant to freely and actively provide information. Article 35 of the Kenyan Constitution states that every Kenyan citizen has a right to information but the process of getting that information is still long, painful and costly. Lack of an informed citizenry According to the Bible, Hosea 4: 6 My people perish from a lack of knowledge.

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The average Kenyan citizen in general is less informed about their right of information. Someone would argue that the average Kenyan is more concerned about matters of food, education for their children, rent and livelihood to care about their right to have access to information. People tend to forget that it is from this information that people would better make decisions about their life and income and development. For a very long time we have operated our lives according to the status quo and not on actual facts and figures. For this reason, it has made it extremely difficult for the team at KODI to state a case when requesting for data because the supply questions the demand side of that data. Its great that a few #KenyansOnTwitter are talking about open data, big data, analytics etc. but the majority of people on the ground have no idea. The myth that the available information is useless Very often when trying to convince developers and private sector to use information available on www.opendata.go.ke they state that the data is too out of date and that they want breaking news. One thing that people do not understand is the process of carrying out government statistics, from data collection to verification, to validation to actual dissemination. Most of the data that is up on the portal is the most up to date data from particular government agencies for example. Some of the data collection processes to release take months or even years. Its always amusing see researchers abroad using KODI to do their research, write their thesis and get actual benefits like getting funding to study more of open governance and transparency in Africa while our own people only keep complaining about the idea of open data. The money is not clear. Where is the money? Open Data, just like technology are value adding services and that on their own; they might not make much sense. This has become one of the biggest problems in regards to KODI when trying to convince people to use the data. The smaller players are having a hard time making money out of open data inventions because they plainly use the data on KODI as the single source of ideas while bigger players have found a way of mashing up data from KODI with other sources to create a better resource and are able to get enormous gains out of the use of KODI as a value adding service. Lack of efficient structures within government The Kenyan government is still very paper-based in its operations but so are many other governments around the world. Walk into most of the offices and you will realize a lot of people have computers but are still hard at work on their black cover books and paper forms. Most of this information is never digitized and if it is, its at a very slow rate. Examples include the & 66&

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Kenyatta National hospital still being so digitally paralyzed that they destroy medical records every five years. This is the case in most Government of Kenya departments. The slow digitizing rates mean that:

It is very hard to get very up to date information It is very difficult to access any information at all It is increasingly impossible to draw any relationships within the existing data in the different agencies.

These are but a few of the reasons why the Kenya Open Data Initiative has takes so long to become a very successful project, although this does not mean that nothing at all is happening. Kenya Open Data might be facing these difficulties but by the fact that a lot of people are now talking about the idea, considering the idea, supporting the idea or even criticizing the idea means that there is a clear view of the importance of this initiative.

Conclusion
The Open Data Initiative is not a perfect solution but work in progress, no matter where you are that without support from: 1. public sector 2. private sector 3. civil society Without effective support of all the key players, this initiative will not manage to fulfill its main objective of reaching all citizens and allowing them to gain from the benefits of information. Open Data needs a lot of crowdsourcing from the efforts to make it happen to the data to make it relevant. Technology has made it much easier to carry out effective crowdsourcing but this also means allowing for effective verification before dissemination. Open Data is a culture. There has to be a community built around the initiative that can go above and beyond to integrate Open Data in its activities without waiting for a legal go ahead or contract to start using it. Open Data is free and open, there should not be an excuse for lack of use or contribution to the initiative.

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About the Author Linet is a Software Engineer at Carnegie Mellon University, working in a team developing the Software Developer Certification (SDC). She is the author of datascience.co.ke a blog that is dedicated at bringing to light the data efforts in the African continent, its challenges and achievements as well as lessons that can be used for knowledge exchange around the world. She has been on the forefront of coordinating the Kenya Open Data Initiative and the Open Government Partnership at the Kenya ICT Board. She is a GIS and software technology consultant who has consulted for multiple companies both locally and internationally including the World Bank, the One Acre Fund, Innovations for Poverty Action, the TIST program, Upande LTD, Maker Faire Africa among others. Linet has an under-graduate degree in Computer Science from the University of Nairobi among other self taught qualifications especially in GIS and data analysis and mining tools within the MIT Open Course Ware program, with a keen focus on the awareness of using data for business intelligence, decision making and resource allocation. She is a recognized unsung hero by the former US ambassador to Kenya in her efforts to encourage more women into the technology and computing space Linet is committed to ensuring the spread of digital literacy in Africa with a keen focus on ensuring quality delivery, development, accurate research and product development.

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