Kenya Open Data Initiative
Summary
In July 2011, Kenya became the first sub-Saharan country to launch an open data
government site, enabling its citizens to gain access to vital information. After a year,
the Kenya Open Data Initiative (KODI) is still a work in progress, but it’s already
beginning to reshape Kenya’s culture of government.
When KODI was launched, Kenya was the first developing country to have an open
government portal, and the 22nd country globally. Today, 31 countries have live,
open government sites, although many other countries are in some stage of
developing their own sites (Annex A). Kenya’s early adoption is due in large part to
the efforts of open data advocates within Kenya’s government and among its
influential technology community. This paper describes the background to the
initiative, the open data content and uses, specific challenges regarding access, and
the relationship of the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics to the open data site.
1.
Introduction
On July 8 2011, the president of the Republic of Kenya, President Mwai Kibaki,
launched the Kenya Open Data Initiative (KODI)i, making key government data
freely available to the public through a single online portal. The initiative affirmed
Kenya’s commitment to the Open Government Partnershipii, and was 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
informationiii.
The data portal is managed by the Kenya Information and
Communication Technology (ICT) Board in partnership with the World Bank, and is
powered by Socrata, a Seattle-based company that has worked on open data projects
with partners such as the City of Chicago and Medicare, the US government social
insurance programme for those aged over 65 and for people living with disabilities.
2.
The content and uses of Kenya’s Open Data Portal
The goal of Kenya’s open data portal is to make core government, development,
demographic, statistical and expenditure data available in a useful digital format for
researchers, policymakers, software developers and the general public. As of May
2012, there were more than 430 datasets that had been uploaded to the Kenya open
data portal, with a plan to upload more data over the coming year. The Kenya
National Bureau of Statistics (KNBS) has played a significant part in the portal by
providing over 60% of the datasets. The data have been organised into 10 categories:
from Environment and Natural Resources, National Accounts and Inflation to
Financial and Health sectors, and Justice. The data can also be explored at the
country level, but also by county or constituency. The 2009 Kenya census, national
and regional expenditure, and information on key public services (geo-referenced
schools and hospitals) were some of the first datasets to be released.
Tools and applications that allow comparisons, visualisations and overlays have been
built to take these data and make them more useful than they originally were. Users
of the open data portal can create interactive charts and tables, researchers and
policymakers can download the raw data, and software developers can download the
raw data via an application program interface (API) to analyse and build applications
for the web and mobile phones. This functionality has seen civil society
organisations, such as Hudumaiv (Kswahili meaning “service delivery”) build
applications for citizens to demand social services from government, and Virtual
Kenya use the open data platform to highlight MPs who were willing/unwilling to pay
taxes on their full salary and expenses.
Figure 1: Virtual Kenya Team Application - Kenya MPs who say they are willing/
unwilling to pay taxes on their salary and expenses
Source: Virtual Kenya, http://www.virtualkenya.org/.
The portal also contains a “suggest a
data. Over a hundred requests from
including data on youth employment,
and secondary schools, and there is
available.
dataset” button that collects requests for new
the public for new dataset have been made,
libraries, land titles, and locations of primary
a clear demand for more data to be made
Since the launch in July 2011, there have been over 47,000 page views of the Open
data portal and over 2,500 datasets downloaded and embedded to various websites.
Kenya now has a USD 6.5 million facility resting with the Kenya ICT Board, to
continue to institutionalise Open Data and the work of building networks of open data
producers and users, including the government, civil society, and the community of
infomediaries.
3.
Access to open data in Kenya.
Whilst the technology community has been quick to capitalise on open data,
inequality and costs remain barriers to making the open data digital platform an outlet
for truly wide access to government information for the general public. Chart 1
shows the poverty profile across the eight provinces in Kenya, and the proportion of
people connected to the internet (red bubbles). It shows that 80% of internet
customers are concentrated in Nairobi, the province with the lowest rate of poverty,
while the other poorer provinces there are less than 10% internet customersv.
Chart 1: Kenya regional rates of poverty (figure) and the distribution with internet
access (bubble)
Poverty
rate
Internet
Access
%
%
Source: Kenya National Bureau of Statistics, Kenya Integrated Household Budget Survey 2005-06, Basic Report on Well-being
in Kenya; Communications Commission of Kenya, Internet Market Analysis Study, May 2007.
According to the Communications Commission of Kenya, only 36% of Kenyans have
access to the internet (compared with 77% of households in the UKvi), but far more
Kenyans, 67%vii, own mobile phones. Therefore, it appears that the short term
success of open data for improving access to government information for ordinary
citizens will depend on the development of mobile applications in particular, until the
costs of the internet and information technology devices (desktops, laptops and other
web enabling devices) come down.
4.
Challenges to the National Statistics Organisation
Kenya’s adoption of an open data portal has presented some challenges to the national
statistics organisation, Kenya National Bureau of Statistics (KNBS). This paper
identifies three challenges:
a) KNBS’s relationship with open data (opendata.go.ke);
b) Control over the data;
c) Improved standards of web dissemination as a result of open data.
KNBS’s relationship with open data – KNBS and opendata.go.ke are both
important for the dissemination of official statistics. KNBS provides the user with a
single point of access to national statistics, with many of KNBS’s social and
economic statistics being available only as offline, static hard copies or in PDF
formats, and a few indicators being available online through the social and economic
database, KENINFO. Open data contains a broader range of Government, publicly
held datasets and national statistics, and provides the user with access to public data,
which are mostly available in reusable formats. There is currently a link between
KNBS’s website and the open data portal, but there is no automatic mechanism
feeding data from the KNBS site to the data portal. Instead, open data makes requests
to KNBS when new data become available. However the effective use open data has
increased the visibility of national statistics and the underlying aggregate data,
requiring KNBS to consider how it maintains a link with open data, and extends links
to the underlying aggregate datasets and metadata.
Control over the data – As the custodian of official statistics and subject experts,
KNBS has historically tended to be cautious over the release of underlying data. This
has required the authorisation of the Director General. But as KNBS’s data holdings
have grown, it has found that it does not have the resources to meet all demands for
in-depth or bespoke analysis. The open data initiative has demonstrated that advances
in technology, combined with making aggregate data available for use and reuse, can
relieve some of this demand by capitalising on external innovation. It has also shown
that there is a clear demand and political will to make public data freely and readily
available, subject to the need to suitably protect the privacy and confidentiality of
personal and business data. KNBS will need to do more to support this, while
minimising the risks of misuse of data by ensuring that released micro data are
anonymised such that they do not compromise the confidentiality or privacy of
individuals, households and businesses, and by providing appropriate metadata and
support. It is worth noting that KNBS and the World Bank have already played an
important quality assurance role for many of the data sets in the open data portal,
particularly in verifying data of the new county administrative units announced under
Kenya’s constitutionviii.
Improved standards of web dissemination as a result of open data – the open data
initiative has shown that organisations such as Google, Virtual Kenya, Ushahidi
(meaning testimony in Kswahili) are ideally placed to help explore official data in
meaningful, interesting and interactive ways. KNBS will need to do more to “open up
the data” to developers by making official statistics downloadable, electronic, and in
machine readable formats. Given that it will not be possible in the short term for
KNBS’s to develop this level ICT expertise in house, it will also need to consider the
possibility of partnerships to enhance its own dissemination practice.
5.
Conclusions
Kenya’s new constitution, backing from the highest level within government, and the
support of the dynamic ICT sector have enabled Kenya to become the first developing
country to have an open government portal. This short paper illustrates that civil
society and software developers have been quick in particular to capitalise on the
open data portal, by creating user-friendly and relevant applications for public use. It
also shows that while internet access in most parts of Kenya, except Nairobi, is low,
preventing many people from benefitting from open data through computers, most
Kenyans have access to mobile phones, and it is through the development of
applications for the mobile that there is greatest potential to exploit open data. The
paper highlights that the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics has played an important
role in populating the open data portal, but the open data portal has presented the
statistics office with some challenges in terms of increased demand for and access to
useable and reusable data, increased demand for micro data, and with this the need to
safeguard the confidentiality and privacy of data, and improved presentation and
analysis of official statistics. The statistics office will also need to respond to this
spirit of openness.
Michael Morris, UK Department for International Development
Annex A: International Open Data sites
Source: http://www.data.gov/opendatasites
USA, Australia, Austria, Bahrain, Belgium, Canada, Chile, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Ireland, Italy, Kenya, Moldova, Morocco,
Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Peru, Republic of Korea, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Spain, Timor Leste, UAE, UK, Uruguay.
i
Kenya Open Data Portal, http://www.opendata.go.ke.
Open Government Partnership, Country Commitments, http://www.opengovpartnership.org/.
iii
The Constitution of Kenya, Chapter 4, The Bill of Rights, August 2010
iv
http://www.huduma.or.ke/
v
Communications Commission of Kenya, Internet Market Analysis Study, May 2007
vi
Office for National Statistics, 2011, Internet Access – Households and Individuals, Statistical Bulletin
vii
Communications Commission of Kenya, Quarterly Sector Statistics Report, Quarter 1, July- September 2011/12
viii
The Constitution of Kenya, 2010, Chapter 2, Devolution and access to services. First schedule
ii