Kenya frees govt data on the internet

President Mwai Kibaki on Friday launched a key website making Kenya the first country in sub sahara Africa to offer loads of government data to its citizens.

Citizens can now access data and participate in constitutional implementation process as well as hold the government accountable, President Kibaki said.

The government has released several large datasets, including the national census and statistics on government spending at national and county level to enhance transparency in governance and access to information.

The data presented in user-friendly format is now available online via an open data portal (www.opendata.go.ke).

Currently much of the public data is in hard copy and other static formats that make their use close to impossible.

Worse still, to access such data one has to seek clearance from authorities in relevant ministries or purchase it from the Government printer after going through a bureaucratic clearance process.

In an interview with Nation, Dr Ndemo said the website will be one of the first and largest government data portals in sub-Saharan Africa.

“With the open data portal, such obstacles will be a thing of the past. Information is power and we are aiming to empower citizens by enhancing their access to usable data that was not accessible easily to the public,” said Ministry of Information Permanent Secretary, Dr Bitange Ndemo.

“For the first time, Kenyans will have information about their community at their fingertips allowing them to make informed decisions at a personal level—currently most decisions people make are not scientific since they are not based on data yet data is available but inaccessible,” he added.

The PS said the portal is part of an initiative of pushing local content to the Internet and to offer over 70,000 Kenyans who graduate from Kenyan colleges annually to manipulate the data for beneficial use.

“By creating a knowledge society, you create a knowledge economy…we do not want to lag behind as we watch other countries releasing data to their people for profitable use…we have not even scratched the surface in terms of data, we are working on data centres, which was our last piece of infrastructure development,” he said.

The information on the portal is from published government data available from the ministries of Finance, Planning, Local Government, Health, Education and the Kenya National Bureaus of Statistics.

According to Dr Ndemo, much of this information is also available at the World Bank and the United Nations thus it beats logic why it has not been openly availed to citizens.

Dr Ndemo said globally, governments are adopting the concept of open data to reap benefits of a more informed citizenry.

This, he said, would deter public servants and politicians from vices such as fraud that thrive in situations where secrecy and monopoly of information abounds.

Dr Ndemo said data users will be able to create maps and other visualizations and directly download underlying data for their own uses.

“Data is not information until it is converted to make sense to users…that is what we have done at the portal,” Dr Nemo said.

This has never happened before and it welcomes an era of openness where the citizen will be empowered to put leaders to account in the use and distribution of public resources.