Last July, Kenya became the first sub-Saharan country to launch an open data government site, enabling its citizens to gain access to vital information. After only six months, the Kenya Open Data Initiative (KODI) is still a work in progress, but it’s already reshaped Kenya’s culture of government.

When KODI was launched, Kenya was only the 22nd country with an open government portal. Today, 30 countries have live, open government sites, though dozens of other countries are in some stage of developing their own. Kenya’s early adoption is due in large part to the efforts of open data advocates both within Kenya’s government and among its influential technology community.

Whether Kenya’s open government will have a lasting, positive impact depends on how Kenyans use the information over time. But KODI’s successful launch illustrates what’s possible when government and technology converge to serve the needs of society.

Many stakeholders, one vision 

Last month, the World Bank released a detailed report about KODI that serves as a case study for open government advocates and practitioners everywhere. Among the takeaways, one can learn how a diverse group of stakeholders from the public, civic and private sectors coalesced to do something tough but important, despite their differences.

Gathering, structuring and publishing large data sets presented KODI’s developers with complex technical challenges. The portal makes available hundreds of data sets from the country’s 2009 census, and from health, education, infrastructure, water and sanitation services. The World Bank provided its development data.

Dr. Bitange Ndemo, Kenya’s Permanent Secretary of Information and Communications was the project driver with vigorous support from Paul Kukubo of Kenya’s ICT Board, and various government agencies.

To garner impetus and support, Ndemo forged a series of critical partnerships with the World Bank and Google, which both provided technical assistance, as well as with a host of local teams.

The platform is powered by Socrata, a Seattle-based company that fashions platforms for local, state and federal governments in the U.S., including open data sites for the city governments of Chicago and Seattle.

Choosing a U.S. firm’s platform rather than to use local developers raised initial concerns. But given the project’s aggressive timetable, the team settled on Socrata, one of only a few companies in the world with the capacity and experience in handling mammoth data sets.

Kenya’s celebrated technology community was instrumental in moving the project forward. Nairobi’s iHub, an “open space” community for developers, played a critical role, as did Ushahidi, the country’s homegrown crisis-mapping agency. (iHub developers built a mobile app enabling a user to locate Constituency Development fund projects and add images of them. The Ushahidi team mashed up census data with health services data on their Huduma site.)

Giant Leap forward

KODI’s launch marks a new chapter in Kenya’s government. Only four years after the country was rocked by post-election violence leaving 1,000 people killed and over a half a million displaced, Kenya fulfilled its mandate of providing citizens with unprecedented transparency and accountability.

Kenya’s President, Mwai Kibuki observed, “Data is the foundation of improving accountability and governance.” Dr. Ndemo tweeted, ”Data will fuel employment and wealth creation like never before.”

In his comments about the initiative, the The World Bank’s Tariq Khokhar, an open data evangelist, said, “Open data in Kenya is special: it comes at a time of national change; it’s got a head start on tools and expertise from the global open data community and it’s happening in a country where the information ecosystem is still maturing.”

The World Bank’s Country Director, Johannes Zutt remarked, “This portal is one of the first and largest government portals with reusable data in sub-Saharan Africa, making Kenya one of the world’s leading exemplars of open data.”

Alex Howard (@digiphile) of O’Reilly Media said, “Open Kenya isn’t simply about meeting data standards or publishing data online. Ultimately, it’s about changing the compact between citizens and their government.”

KODI’s development model can serve as a roadmap for other countries committed to realizing open government. Its successful launch is further proof that open government is an idea whose time has come.

At a time when politics is dictating social agendas in many countries, Kenya’s open government initiative is a testament to what a society can do when it focuses on what really matters.

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More on this subject?

Have a look at Alex Howard’s thorough piece, “GOV 2.0 2011 – Year in Review” and his earlier article, “Open Government Data to fuel Kenya’s App Economy”.  Here’s a post about KODI on the Ushahidi blog.

The OpenGovPartnership noted (1/31): “Now that Kenya has launched its open data portal, the OGP taskforce is becoming less focused on the programmers and more focused on civil society leadership. This week, Kenya’s open data initiative organized a workshop (with the World Bank and the African Media Initiative) for media leaders and journalists…”

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Nairobi Skyline

“This is the future of African technology, and if you blink, you’ll miss it.”  ~Erik Hersman

On the ‘Silicon Savanna’

Last month in Nairobi, Kenya, a conference called Pivot25 connected 25 promising mobile app developers from East Africa with investors and venture capitalists. Events like this one, based on the Y Combinator model, give aspiring developers a rare chance to pitch their ideas for possible seed capital.

What’s intriguing about Pivot25 is the attention that it drew from outside the region. TIME Magazine ran a piece about the conference from the standpoint of Nairobi’s contribution to global technology. CNN’s Global Public Square covered the event, too. Why so much attention?

It’s due to Nairobi’s growing reputation as a hotbed of mobile software development. The city has earned the moniker ‘Silicon Savanna’ due to high-profile, innovative mobile ventures launched there including Ushahidi, the ‘open source’ crisis-mapping platform, and M-Pesa, the world’s first mobile money service — a model for ‘access to banking’ services.

Both platforms were originally modest, homegrown solutions for local problems that were later widely adopted outside the region. The global tech community is expecting stellar performers in Nairobi’s next wave of apps and services, too.

The right stuff

On the surface, Nairobi may not look like a prime contender to be the next ICT hub. With a population of 3.5 million, it’s only the 12th largest city on the continent, but it’s one of East Africa’s most vital commercial and cultural centers.

Incubators are springing up in Lagos, Accra, Dakar and other large African cities, but Nairobi stands out due to the top-tier multinational firms using the city as a base for serving Africa’s booming mobile markets.

Nairobi is becoming known for its vibrant community of mobile developers whose ingenuity and confidence are growing over time. Their cleverly designed apps — elegant in their simplicity — are now part of Africa’s social landscape.

The city is also home to a small, vocal cadre of tech advocates who’ve trumpeted their community’s early wins, convincing audiences around the world that there’s more innovation on the way. The impact of potent advocacy is often overlooked when observers speculate about why Nairobi has the right stuff to be the epicenter of mobile technology.

An ‘ecosystem built on talent’

One of Nairobi’s more influential advocates is Erik Hersman, co-founder of Ushahidi, and founder of iHub (‘innovation-Hub’), an open-space tech incubator with over three thousand members. He contends that Nairobi’s pool of gifted developers is responsible for the region’s dominance.

“It’s an ecosystem built on talent,” he said in an interview with TNW Africa. “Nairobi is exploding with world-caliber techies, and companies such as Google, Cisco, Nokia, Seimens and Airtel (all of which built their African headquarters in Nairobi) have recognized that.”

He added, “Certain cities tend to be hubs, success breeds success, so when someone wins in a place like Nairobi, it quickly attracts more entrepreneurs and spinouts.”

A global stage

Success does indeed breed success, but the region also benefits from Hersman’s unique ability to attract capital for funding new projects. He’s not only a champion for Nairobi’s talent, he also creates workspaces for nurturing it.

In addition to his iHub initiative, described as “part open community workspace, part vector for investors and VCs, and part incubator,” Hersman is a driving force behind m:labs — Africa’s first mobile incubator launched on the heels of Pivot25 with support from the World Bank, Nokia and the Government of Finland.

Through his influential ‘White African’ blog and his roles as a TED Fellow and a PopTech Fellow, Hersman has a global stage on which to showcase his community’s engineers who bring, as he says, “ingenuity born of necessity”.

His latest contribution to building Nairobi’s image as an tech hub was his involvement in the Kenya Open Data Initiative (KODI), launched July 8, when Kenya became the first African country, and one of the first in the world, to make government data accessible to its citizens. (Here’s more on KODI.)

Hersman’s pitch to investors is compelling: Nairobi’s talented developers are creating the next wave of mobile software for the African market and beyond. Like their predecessors, the most promising new apps will affect a large number of people in a meaningful way.

This is an exciting space to watch. We’re witnessing history unfold now in Africa. As TIME Magazine’s Africa bureau chief put it: “…this is not a story merely of how technology is changing Africa. Africans are changing technology right back.”

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Image: ‘Nairobi from Uhuru Park’ Courtesy of Arthur Buliva

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Want more info on this subject?

• –Superb WIRED piece, Switching On: Africa’s Vast New Tech Opportunity (7/11).
• –Other champions of Kenya’s mobile tech community include Ory Okolloh of Google Africa and Juliana Rotich of Ushahidi
• –Hersman makes the case (2 clips): Africa in the 21st Century, and in his ‘09 TED Talk on launching Ushahidi
• –For context, Ken Banks, founder of kiwanja.net and FrontlineSMS, shares his views on mobile usage in developing markets
• –WIRED piece (July 12, 2011): Switching on: Africa’s new tech opportunity
• –TED Global – Africa (’07) series from Arusha, Tanzania — it’s amazing how far the African tech scene has evolved since then
• –A Touch Points post on Ushahidi’s role in the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake

• –Addendum: Hershman post (7/18), “What makes iHub work?”

As always, I’d appreciate your views…

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It’s been a week since the Port-au-Prince earthquake and images streaming in are helping us to grasp the region’s boundless misery and desperation. Hundreds of thousands have perished, and despite our best efforts, more will die and suffer for myriad reasons including the inability to deliver relief where it’s needed.

Despite the gut-wrenching news, it’s heartening to learn that determined, inventive people are finding ways to alleviate the suffering and, in some cases, save lives.

One of the more interesting stories is about an open-source project called Ushahidi which takes its name from the Swahili word for “testimony”.  The software, developed during the post-election violence in Kenya in 2008, enables text messages to be mapped by time and location.  Anyone with an internet connection, regardless of the device they use to access it, can send a text message, an image or an email. Ushahidi can also store data offline for later synchronization.

During its initial deployment in Kenya, Ushahidi was used to record hundreds of incidents of violence that might have otherwise gone undetected. It’s since been used to document incidents in the War in Gaza,the Vote Report India and Pak Voices (violence in Pakistan).  Ushahidi has also been used to track crime using its Atlanta Crime Maps.

But the application met its most demanding test after the earthquake in Haiti when the country’s mobile networks were down. Even after coverage was restored, the Ushahidi team realized that they needed a local SMS short code for the system to be widely accessible.

With a little help from our friends

Fortunately, Ushahidi has friends in high places. The team turned to Josh Nesbit, Co-Founder of FrontlineSMS:Medic, who used Twitter to reach a contact on the ground who was on his way to local mobile carrier DigiCel’s command center. With the help of the U.S. State Department, Ushahidi secured short code 4636 from DigiCel which is now being used to record the times, locations, and accounts of incidents.

Ushahidi updates its Haiti incident map with reports of medical emergencies, security threats, relief efforts and logistical bottlenecks.  It provides a filter for mapping earthquake survivors and deaths. Ushahidi also aggregates Tweets and streams from YouTube and Flickr, all of which can serve to orient first responders and relief workers while giving the rest of us a granular picture of what’s going on in the region.

Ushahidi teams in Kenya and Uganda are working around the clock to verify data from Haiti, and a university in Geneva, Switzerland is establishing a situation room there. Meanwhile, Ushahidi’s Boston team has approached Harvard, MIT and other institutions seeking volunteers to handle the massive volume of data pouring in.

As someone interested in how “home grown” technology is used in developing regions, this story is especially gratifying.  Ushahidi is about how inventive people in one developing country have created a simple but powerful “crowd-sourcing” tool to provide assistance in another hemisphere.

I’m concerned that “crisis fatigue” will set in, dampening world interest in supporting Haiti’s relief efforts.  By raising awareness about the on-going challenges in the region, we stand a chance of preventing the potential “disaster after the disaster”.

As this crisis evolves, new unforeseen challenges will arise. Let’s recognize that this is a long-haul operation. Perhaps stories like Ushahidi can serve to focus our attention on the enormous level of humanitarian assistance that’s needed in Haiti, and what we can do about it.

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Note: Ushahidi is currently seeking volunteers to process incoming SMS reports. Here are instructions to find out how you can help.

> Update (4/6/10):  Here’s an interview with Ushahidi’s Patrick Meier on a range of issues around crisis mapping and validation.

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Want more info about Ushahidi? Here is more on the 4636 SMS emergency code being used in Haiti.

And this is a Forbes piece (11-08), Citizen Voices:  “A Kenyan blogger found a way to get information from the crowd. Now she wants to take the idea to other parts of the world in trouble.”

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