in kenya, africa’s first national open data initiative

Today was a historical day, as Kenya became the first country in Africa to initiate a national open data project.

The data allows users to view different data at national, county and constituency levels. They can compare the different sets of data, and also create maps and other visualizations. The data sets are categorized into 6 main categories: Education, Energy, Health, Population, Poverty and Water & Sanitation. This includes data from the national census, the ministry of education, ministry of health, CDF projects and many more.

The team at Ushahidi have also built a very simple SMS-based tool which allows anyone in Kenya to get information about the demographics and MP of that location, by simply texting the name of their county or constituency to the number 3018. Remember this only works if you’re in Kenya.

This certainly places Kenya in a leading position in the continent, and hope is that developers will take this as a challenge and come up with apps/tools which can use these massive sets of data, that were never once accessible.

There have been instances of governments opening data for the public, and the best case for this would be the Right to Information Act of India initiated in 2005.

The Act specifies that citizens of India have a right to:

• request any information (as defined).
• obtain copies of documents.
• inspect documents, works and records.
• take certified samples of materials of work