The Business Case for Open Data

Many have questioned how government projects run and if Open Data in Kenya is facing the same fate.

From a lot of conversations and meetings I have had, what a lot of people have not realized is that beyond the open data portals in different countries e.g www.opendata.go.ke  in Kenya, open data is a concept. Open Data Initiatives all around the world are about governments making their data freely and publicly accessible. The beauty of open data portals is they consolidate the data and put it within a single URL so the user does not have to remember multiple addresses for accessing these data.

Definition: Open data is data that can be freely used, reused and redistributed by anyone – subject only, at most, to the requirement to attribute and share alike. – Source: Open Data Handbook

In no place, in this definition and many other definitions is there a mention or a requirement that Open Data must exist within one portal.

Various ministries within government have made their data publicly available through their own web portals and while there has been ongoing work on legislation and policy to change that, there is nothing that requires them to make their data available through the open data portal except for goodwill.

To name a few examples:

• The ministry of agriculture and fisheries makes available all market data on the sale of commodities in all major markets on a daily basis.
• The Kenya national bureau of statistics has made a ton of data available including the statistical abstracts and economic surveys all the way from the 60s
• The ministry of health makes available all data about the health facilities in the country, what services they offer, how stocked they are, capacity: beds, doctors, nurses
• The Kenya open data initiative (KODI) has made important information like CDF expenditures, demographics, poverty rates, education etc available

These are just but a few examples and these particular examples actually make the data available in open formats. We are always working to ensure that all this data can exist within one portal.

The Open Data Initiative has not come without challenges and to understand these challenges, the list is endless out there on the challenges but the reason I decided to write this post is to bring out some of the opportunities and benefits of the ideas of open data within government and other organizations that I am sure would have taken longer to be realized if the initiative had not been launched in 2011.

Legislation:

Access to information and Data Protection bills were crafted in 2006 and since then, they had been in negotiation and basically were shelved for a while. After the inception of Open Data in 2011, the debate on the two bills was rekindled in 2012 and in september 2014, the cabinet, chaired by the president approved the two bills that are now waiting for the final parliament approval to become law.

The access to information is now law and the data protection bill is in public hearings. Great progress.

Policy:

Before the open data ideas, there was no policy guiding how data should be shared or made available within government but since open data, the ICT Authority is worked on a policy for data sharing, the KNBS has a policy in place and many other ministries are looking at these conversations.

Digitization:

Have you stopped to ask why the government is heavily digitizing its records? Access. Transparency. Openness. Many government agencies including the civil registry departments on births and deaths, the ministry of education, Ministry of health are now heavily digitizing to not only save on storage space but also make the data publicly and easily accessible.

 Standardization:

A lot of government institutions collect data every so often. There are departments within departments and the way it happened, everyone would collect their own data in their own format using their own codes and fields. Since the inception of open data, for instance, the World Bank gave the Ministry of Education $1 million to create an integrated education database that would implement a standardized way of data collection and naming. This data was to be made available through the open data portal, the process is ongoing.

Data Literacy:

Through the Open Data movement, a lot of companies have been formed in Kenya to utilize open data and citizen awareness. Organizations like Open Institute, Code4Kenya, iHub Research, Mzalendo, DataScience utilize open data in a lot of their activities both nationally and at the county level.

The media has not been left behind. Data journalism like the fantastic work Internews is doing in Kenya, a lot of it relies on open data from the government. NTV has done a few features that have been based on data from KODI and other government sources to name but a few.

Transparency:

We come from a history of not sharing. The traditional secrets act has been in place since the 70s and still going. Most recently (2012), Kenya joined the Open Government Partnership with her key mandate is using open data to be transparent and more engaging with citizens. I can confidently say that over the past 4 years we have seen great information flows from the government than ever before. We do not yet have everything, but something sure is happening.

Most of these government systems have been in existence for decades and have created a government culture that will take a while to dilute but the milestones that the idea of an open government have achieved cannot be underplayed.

Open data is not an end in its self, it is a small cog in a big machine and maybe I am privileged because I experienced this progress when I was heading the project at the ICTA.