Kenya - Earlier this year, the World Bank predicted that Kenya was on the brink of becoming Africa's ICT hub due to strong sustained growth in Internet and mobile technologies. Thus when Kenya launched its Open Data portal last month, it was a move intended to solidify this budding reputation as the continent's "Silicon Savannah"--modelled on Silicon Valley in the US. The Open Data portal made 290 sets of government data available to the public, on health, education, access to infrastructure, water and sanitation services, as well as government spending per county.

Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Information and Communication Dr Bitange Ndemo says the response to the data portal has been overwhelmingly positive.

"We have received numerous requests from various organisations to release more data, especially census data and data from the Interim Independent Electoral Commission. People really want to interrogate what's been happening, and the best way to do so is to look at hard figures," says Dr Ndemo.

The Open Data Portal is developed on Socrata platform, which, like the Wordpress used by bloggers, can be customised and tweaked without being technically demanding.

This makes it easy for more data to be uploaded on to the portal as needed. It also allows visualisations such as graphs, charts and maps, though Google's Public Data Explorer is more user-friendly and offers much more interesting visualisations.

Google's Public Data Explorer can "mash-up" several indicators, such as fertility rate, life expectancy and time, revealing a graph of bubbles moving about on a time line, each bubble representing a country.

Kenya's fertility rate falls as life expectancy rises, for instance, with life expectancy peaking at nearly 60 years in the mid-1980s, only to dramatically shrink back in the 1990s to about 51 years in the wake of the HIV/Aids pandemic.

As Kenya's ICT star rises, tech entrepreneurs are now set to cash in on grants that will allow them to design these kinds of applications. Through the Kenya ICT Board, the ministry is now accepting proposals for the Tandaa Digital Content Grant, which is a three-year grant programme intended to support development of local digital content. The grant will fund the development of innovative mobile or web applications.

Eligibility is reserved to Kenyan citizens and companies registered in Kenya, and successful individuals will benefit from grants of up to $10,000, with companies receiving $50,000.

At least 30 grants are expected to be awarded this year, up from the 15 awarded last year. The call for proposals is running from July 21- August 22 2011.

The Tandaa Digital Content Grant is divided into two categories, private sector innovation and government open data.

In the private sector category, the Kenya ICT Board will select the most innovative proposals that demonstrate long term business viability.

Proposals in this category must respond to a demonstrated market need and have a positive impact on the community it seeks to serve.

In 2010, the Kenya ICT Board awarded seven grants in this category including a diary farmer payment application and a social media marketing product.

In the government open data category, innovators are expected translate the large government data sets into useful apps that can be scaled up quickly to reach the greatest number of users. Eduweb, an online school portal that uses data from the Ministry of Education to provide a service for parents selecting schools for their children, was among seven grants awarded in 2010.

The Kenya ICT board will also offer business plan training to the top 150 applicants to help them secure funding and grow their business. The PS says already, about 130 apps have been developed from available data.

Analysts say that the access to data is one of the tools that will move the country away from personality-based politics to evidence-based decision making. "We are now at a point where we can apply scientific methods in decision making," says Mr Ndemo.

"For example, one can investigate the performance of secondary schools in Kiambu in the central region with Siaya in Western Kenya, and compare other factors that make Kiambu different from Siaya--access to electricity and water, or government spending. It's the statistics that tell the story, giving the ordinary citizen leverage in making leaders accountable."

Christine Mungai

The East African/08/08/2011