FACTSHEET ON THE CODE4KENYA APPS

24 January 2013

Code4Kenya Overview

Website: www.code4kenya.org

Code4Kenya was a 6-month experiment to help accelerate the ability for the public to make sense of

data and to galvanize engagement around critical public issues. The experiment was to test a model

that will be put to use in a broader two-year Incubator effort, endorsed and supported by the

highest levels of government which, will be led by public mobilization agents with support from the

technology community.

The program was funded by the Africa Media Initiative, through their Digital Projects Division and

the World Bank's Innovation Fund and Governance Partnership Facility. The Open Institute was the

implementing Organization for the Project. The stakeholders included the Kenya ICT Board,

iLabAfrica, and iHub Research.

During the program’s duration, four Fellows were embedded in one civil society organization and

three media organizations. Working with a team of four software developers, they each worked to

build service around key thematic issues. In the initial phase, focus themes were water, education

and health, with cross-cutting issues including public financial management and counties/local

government data. Host organizations and fellows conducted a close consultation process with

members of thematic expert working groups who provided insight into specific use cases and

technical insight into available data resources.

The specific goals of the process was to

● Create one app or service or platform per team that is used at scale across Kenyan society

and drastically increases the use of open data,

● As well as develop use cases, recommendations, toolkits and a critical analysis of the pre-

incubation process, and

As part of this, the African Media Initiative managed the design and rollout of the Code4Kenya

Fellowship through their implementing agent The Open Institute. The program focused on two of

the three goals mentioned above namely;

1. Creation of the app/service/platform to be used at scale across the country

2. Development of use cases, recommendations, toolkits and a critical analysis of the process.

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The four fellows were embedded within the host organizations while the developers were housed at

an incubation facility. Led by a Project Manager, the team of eight worked closely with their host

organizations to identify opportunities for innovation with open data, identify the right technology

solutions, build them out, test and launch.

A total of eight projects were developed by the Code4Kenya team during the program period in

addition to the establishment of data divisions/units within the host organizations and securing

commitments from the host organizations to publish their own data on dedicated portals. This has

resulted in the first corporate open data portals on the continent and the introduction of a valuable

element, which was until now, missing within the open data ecosystem.

Fellow: Muchiri Nyaggah

Email: Muchiri@semacraft.com

Twaweza is a citizen-centered initiative focused on large-scale change in East Africa. They support

the implementation of projects that facilitate social change through partnerships with other

organizations in the civil society and private sector. During his time at Twaweza, Muchiri was

available to the Twaweza team as resource in evaluating the viability of some ICT-driven projects the

organization had been approached to support as well as examining at some of their partnerships to

establish whether there were opportunities to improve them further.

Muchiri also helped the organization understand how a data desk team could function within the

organization and how it would benefit their programs and partners. Further consultations are on-

going to assemble the team and determine their terms of reference within Twaweza’s context.

The Application: FindMySchool

It is very difficult for parents in Kenya to find a source of information that shows how individual

schools perform across the country. Access to information of this nature that illustrates a trend over

a 6-year period is not available to the general public. Together with Twaweza, Muchiri and the

Code4Kenya team developed a web application known as FindMySchool that makes all this possible.

The application also provides a simple and elegant solution that makes it easy for parents to find out

which schools their children can gain admission to based on their current performance. By utilizing

public data the platform provides information that inspires parents and students and potentially

Find My School Platform for parents to compare schools on various metrics

encourages parents to be more involved in the running of their schools. The platform can be

implemented in any country where the data is available.

Next Steps

1. Through partnership with the Kenya National Examination Council, the website will soon

include data for both KCPE and KCSE examinations going back to 2006. This will provide

deeper analysis of school performance and also make it possible to analyze regional

performance in these examination results over a period of time.

2. There are on-going consultations with a media organization to use the platform to generate

content related to the education sector in Kenya. Over the next three months, it is hoped

FindMySchool shall be part of the news gathering process for stories related to education.

3. Additional data from other stakeholders such as Uwezo shall be included in the platform in

order to give additional context to performance and possibly highlight factors affecting

performance in various parts of the country.

4. We are exploring which elements of the website can be made available via mobile phone.

Website: findmyschool.co.ke

data.findmyschool.co.ke

Fellow: Simeon Oriko

Email: simeon@mtotowajirani.com

Simeon, while at The Standard, worked with the leadership team to identify sources of data that

were valuable to the journalists and played a role in the acquisition of the data. Some of this data,

like that used for the application built for Standard Media Group, was liberated from non-digital

forms and converted into digital re-usable formats.

The infrastructure required to ensure the data portal was available to the staff was implemented

with Simeon’s help and he worked with the IT team to maintain it and improve its implementation.

Ensuring sustainability of the work started was key and to this end Simeon conducted workshops on

data visualization tools and processes as well as sensitizing the journalists on data journalism.

County Safety Visualization Consolidate available crime data sets into a visualization to map and identify key crime trends across country

The Application: County Safety

Once the team working within The Standard’s archives were able to liberate data from the Standard

Media’s library, which was mostly in unstructured formats, they converted it into datasets that

categorized crimes according to the county where it was reported. This data was used to build an

interactive website through which it is now possible for citizens to visualize crime incidences on a

map of Kenya’s counties. The service uses an intensity map to communicate nationwide trends but

also uses graphs to show trends for every crime category as well as a map to help users find police

stations.

Next Steps

1. Editorial features will be developed using insights found in the website. As the team

continues to add data to the website, updates on trends shall form the basis for new stories

on both the print and online editions of the Standard newspaper.

2. Data journalism ideas have already generated - mostly around election related issues and

will continue to be an active part of the organization’s process.

3. Additional staff have been recruited to help extract more data and generated visualizations

for use by the journalists

4. More training on data journalism is planned at all levels of the organization in the near

future.

5. Plans are underway to formally assemble a data journalism unit within the media group.

Website: http://data.standardmedia.co.ke/countysafety

Fellow: Madi Jimba-Yahya

Email: madijimba@gmail.com

Madi was embedded at The Star newspaper and immediately he arrived he was introduced to all the

senior journalists. Therafter, he facilitated design-thinking sessions to help them understand the

underlying thinking behind Code4Kenya’s work which is focused on human-centered design. These

sessions exposed the team at the Star to human-centered design and maked it possible for them to

take that approach on future projects within the organization. Madi was valuable in helping change

Health application site integrating national health program stats

the mindset of the journalists towards data and a culture of data-driven journalism has begun to

take root there. One of his efforts was the set up of a data desk to compliment the efforts of the

journalists through deeper data analysis. The Star has now recruited staff for this function.

The Application: StarHealth

The StarHealth dashboard is an interactive website that works for the journalists as much as it serves

the general public. The dashboard has the following components

● Data visualisation: Visualisations of health related data to easily understand the latest and

largest health industry issues. Some of the data used is available on the Kenya Open Data

portal (opendata.go.ke).

● Feature stories: The data analysed from the datasets within the repository can be used by

journalists to provide content for feature stories.

● A Data Application that will allow users to search for registered doctors, services available in

which health facility in their organization and the rate that their NHIF contributions will

cover in the different health facilities in their County.

● An open data repository powered by the Open Knowledge Foundation’s CKAN.

Next Steps

1. In the future, the data desk will be increasingly active in data mining and data archiving. This

data shall be uploaded onto the data portal and the health related data used to update

StarHealth.

2. Some of the interactive web applications will be extended onto mobile SMS and possible as

downloadable apps in the near future.

Website: health.the-star.co.ke, data.the-star.co.ke

Fellow: Jude Mwenda

Email: judemwenda@gmail.com

Data Story and Elections platform for journalists to use data for stories on Water, Education, Health, infrastructure

He was also central in setting up Nation media’s mapping service. This is crucial to our core business

in creating rapid visualizations in line with our work. Some of the visualizations done using this

platform include the voter apathy map’s that were crucial in telling stories on the current voter

registration exercise. He also worked closely with one of the East African journalists to scrape data

from different financial statement in order the journalist could use such data to tell financial stories.

This is currently an ongoing story.

Digitization of election results gazetted during previous elections and creating base data to be used

for future coverage on stories. He was also crucial in setting up political API which sets base for

future work on election and generated content.

Jude was core to setting up a data desk. Part of efforts of setting up this data desk include setting up

our data repository. He also trained data champions in uploading data sets they come across onto

the platform. Core to his work, he created several visualization some of which made it to the print

media. Most of the visualizations can be viewed on the http://elections.nation.co.ke website.

The Application

The answer was to build a base of tools that journalists may use to generate and publish

visualizations on the platform. Given the nature of the visualizations and given NMG’s electoral

coverage it was pragmatic to have a platform that primarily provides geographical visualizations.

Nation also does several pieces on counties and county government. This is digital content that has

some interactivity for the media consumers. The platform that was designed is made up of three

major components. These are

1. Data Repository: - This is core to the platform given the different datasets journalists will

have to share to write their stories. This repository holds all data sets that journalists have

used to write their stories. Simple visualization techniques will be provided to help users

interact with the data sets. CKAN is an open source platform and the proposed platform will

run embedded on CKAN.

2. Data Story : - The need to link some of the stories journalists have written to data sets. This

is a simple publishing system akin to Wordpress providing journalists with writing and

publishing tools. These tools enable the journalist to import some data sets that are central

to their interest while doing their story and gives them the capability to embed infographics

on the story. The system will provide for different types of infographics. For the first phase

these will be charts and maps.

3. Siasa API :- An application programming interface is a protocol used to allow two distinct

software applications to communicate. The Siasa API provides software developers and

advanced users of internet tools with the ability to communicate with the data stored on

Nation’s data service. Nation has data for past elections and this data is stored on a database

in a form that is searchable via this API. This will enable journalists, while covering specific

elective territories, to pull from the API the territories election history. Part of the Siasa API

will provide access to opinion poll data and lay the base for provision of insights on

upcoming elections. This will have a citizen engagement aspect, providing users with the

ability to comment or raise issues affecting them and how they are being governed.

Next Steps

1. He will still be providing support on the mapping platform and creating new visualizations as

more data is made available. Use of the same platform to tell stories on other issues facing

the country.

2. A central data desk where journalists can send the data the acquire through their news

gathering process for visualization.

3. Monetization of the platforms in order to turn them into revenue-generating assets for

Nation Media Group.

Website: maps.nationmedia.com, data.nationmedia.com

Contacts:

Noreen Wambui, African Media Initiative, nwambui@africamediainitiative.org; +254 20 269 4004

Peter Warutere, World Bank, pwarutere@worldbank.org; +254 20 322 6444

Jay Bhalla, Open Institute, jay@openinstitute.com