Kenya Open Data usage on the rise

While officiating at an Open Data awareness campaign breakfast in Nairobi on Thursday, October 15, 2015, Engineer Victor Kyalo CEO ICT Authority revealed that in the past four months alone, people accessing or in need of the resources on the open data had tremendously increased and that more government agencies were starting to provide the much-needed data.

KODI is a project of of the Kenyan ICT Authority providing a one-stop access point for all public data. Open data is data that is publicly available in a discoverable way. The project works with national government agencies and county governments to release and archive data in friendly reusable forms, basically sharing it publicly and freely.

According to Mr. Kyalo, viewership of Open Data on the KODI’s portal that was relaunched four months ago, had gone up by 10 million hits to reach 54 million. He observed that the last four months have especially been very encouraging with added support from the government that has realised what needs to be done in order to get more results from the data being manipulated.

He also revealed that the data sets provided KODI had increased from 680 in the last four months to 692 because more government agencies had started to willingly provide the data. A data set is a collection of related sets of information that is composed of separate elements but can be manipulated as a unit by a computer.

Kyalo observed that there is urgent need of timely data from national and county governments and one of the interventions in place was appointing data fellows and various levels or counties to look through the data as it is being processed. He said that KODI needs goodwill ambassadors to promote the uptake Open Data.

The KODI Open Data project manager Linet Kwamboka told guests at the breakfast that her agency’s aim is to get more data from government and make it available for the public. “We have data, but we need more data,” she said.

Sifa Mawiyoo KODI’s GIS specialist said the agency has Sun-Saharan-Africa’s first ever Open Data portal and is Africa’s top most open data publisher and that they emerged among the top 3 finalists in the Bloomberg Open Data Aawards 2015.

The event was graced by the presence of open data suppliers and open data users and each of the two groups talked about their experiences, successes and challenged in dealing with open data. Among those present were the Kenya National Examinations council, the Police, The Water Ministry.

The Kenya National Audit Ofiice was represented by Justus Ongera who said they generate a lot of data and that his agency believes that data should be open to the public and so theyhave put in place mechanisms in which they will continually feed the Open Data portal with information, including adding it to part of the their ICT strategy.

Ongera also mentioned that there were challenges they were experiencing in sharing the data and these included among others, how to structure the data so that it is understandable, how to build systems that publish open data, how to change internal processes to enable Audit staff to create Open Data. The specific challenges he mentioned had to do with publishing, automation, metadata, visualisation, policy environment, public consultation and public skills to deal with Open Data.

Government Open Data suppliers generally agreed in their presentations that there was need for publicity for open data and the development of open data tools and standards for consistency.