National Data Forum seemed heavy on talk but light on walk
What you need to know:
- It seems Kenya is experiencing a data revolution that is happening while some of us sleep through it, including yours truly.
- The whole idea behind opening up the data is that the government, as the largest collector of national data, should find a way to make it available to third parties.
- The biggest hurdle in the way of making data widely, digitally available is actually mental. Governments, by nature, believe in and operate in secrecy.
On Friday August 28, 2015, Kenya held its first National Data Forum. Touted as the first national data forum in Africa, it was officially opened by the Deputy President, Hon. William Ruto.
Other high-ranking officials, including Governors, Cabinet secretaries, Members of Parliament, and top representatives from the UN and international development partners accompanied him.
Clearly, this forum had been accorded far more weight than I had imagined and its theme was even more bombastic – “Harnessing the Data Revolution for Sustainable Development”.
It seems Kenya is experiencing a data revolution that is happening while some of us sleep through it, including yours truly.
The full details of the facilitators, thematic areas and discussions are here but in a nutshell, the national data forum was simply saying that the current way in which public data is being collected, disseminated and consumed is not efficient.
An urgent call was made to have this data cycle revamped in light of new developments in ICT, the usual example cited to elaborate this concept of course being the Kenya Open Data Portal.
In its budget application, for example, citizens can graphically drill down the government budget figures by ministry, project or funding agency. Better still, the data can be exported into other formats for further analysis. This gives citizens the ability to hold their national and county governments to account.
The whole idea behind opening up the data is that the government, as the largest collector of national data, should find a way to make it available to third parties. These third parties (data-preneurs or data innovators) would then mine the data and present it in a better format that the public can easily relate to.
Using government data, third parties can mesh –mix and match- different datasets to create knew value that would be consumed by the public.
This concept is not entirely new and has been ably demonstrated by Google in their Google Maps service, which relies on US government-provided satellite data to create value for citizens.
Google makes money from advertisement revenues driven by the billions of “eye-balls” visiting the Google Maps-related sites.
GOVERNMENT SECRECY
A typically Kenyan example would be to mesh cattle population data and water-point data within pastoralist counties and then run that against climate data in order to create and predict potential hotspots for conflict over water resources. A more urban example would be to mesh pub and bar location data against road network data in order to properly position Alco-blow units, or better still, enable taxi services identify potentially not-very-sober clients.
So all this is fancy and possible. The question is why it is not happening on the scale one would expect.
How come we are not able to “Harness the Data Revolution for Sustainable Development”?
The answer is simple. Government data is largely held in paper form, and getting it online requires quite some effort. We are not talking about technical effort here, since we have enough youthful talent and systems to digitise government data in the shortest time possible.
The biggest hurdle in the way of making data widely and digitally available is actually mental. Governments, by nature, believe in and operate in secrecy.
Most government bureaucrats enjoy a false sense of importance when they go through a paper report stamped “Top Secret” or “Highly Confidential”, even when its contents are easily found in yesterday’s tabloids.
The situation is not helped much when legislators are busy trying to enact laws to gag the media instead of enacting those that liberate and democratise data for the public good.
Specifically, we can cite the Data Protection Bill and the Access to Information Bill which have been conveniently ignored by the last two administrations, with the current following exactly the same script.
That is why many felt that the National Data Forum was quite heavy on the talk, but perhaps very light on the walk. Could this be another case of “Kusema bila Kutenda”?
Put differently, there will be no data revolution unless and until government enacts the two pieces of legislation mentioned above.
Mr Walubengo is a lecturer at the Multimedia University of Kenya's Faculty of Computing and IT. Twitter:@jwalu email: [email protected]
