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Kenya’s new president, Uhuru Kenyatta, has been inaugurated in a peaceful transition of power after fears that a close election result and contested court case might lead to violence.
Adds hyperlink to Justin Arenstein's name in sixth paragraph
Kenya’s new president, Uhuru Kenyatta, has been inaugurated in a peaceful transition of power after fears that a close election result and contested court case might lead to violence.
One group in particular will feel they played a part; a small team of software developers and activists called Code4Kenya. Their web application, GotToVote!, helped Kenyans to register at polling booths, send peace messages and report electoral fraud. Its success shows the power of open data for civil society as well as its challenge to traditional models of international aid.
The Code4Kenya program was conceived and funded by the Africa Media Initiative (AMI) and the World Bank’s Innovation Fund as a way to cultivate Kenya’s open data ecosystem as well as harness the talent of its expanding IT sector.
Project manager Jay Bhalla, director of the think tank the Open Institute, sees the Kenyan programmes as the first step in developing continent-wide data apps that will arm citizens with information they can act on. Their next project, Africa Spending, has been shortlisted for the Knight Foundation News Challenge and will let people see where their tax dollars are being spent in every African country.
Through a pioneering collaboration between developers, technologists, journalists and civil society activists, Code4Kenya developed six open-source applications in just five months. GotToVote! began in November 2012 when Kenya’s Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission published the location of voter registration centres for the first time.
According to Justin Arenstein, a Knight International Journalism Fellow working for the AMI, this important information was locked in a large, complicated PDF file, a format that is notoriously difficult to extract data from. Lead developer David Lemayian and one of the initiative's Data Fellows, Simeon Oriko, set about scraping the information and turning it into an interactive spreadsheet that was used to build the GotToVote! website.
Users could easily find out where their nearest voting station was and where to register for the election. This simple but vital service went viral on social media and was used by more than 2,500 people within hours of its launch. But perhaps the most impressive part of the story was that the whole site was built in 24 hours for less than $500.
“The Kenyan government was spending a massive amount of money to get people registered but there was a new voting system and people couldn’t find out where to go, so this was important information that people needed and didn’t have,” said the Open Institute's Bhalla.
“You don't need the money that you see in other development programmes. There are many cases when the funding figures involved don't match the impact of the program. GotToVote! was created in 24 hours with $300-$500 and the impact was incredible,” he added.
By contrast, Britian's Department for International Development (DfID) has allocated £2.2 million ($3.3 million) on a programme for Kenyan ‘Civic and Voter Education’ run by a Kenyan organisation called Uraia Trust, whose website is still under construction.
While this may not be a fair comparison as we do not have details of the Uraia Trust programme, it shows that the "hacktivist" approach of Code4Kenya often comes up with elegant solutions precisely because it does not have the resources of large international aid organisations.
By keeping the team deliberately small and specialised, Code4Kenya sidesteps another criticism often levelled at the traditional development model -- that too much money gets soaked up by the bureaucracy both of the international donors and the countries receiving the money.
An investigation by the Britain's s Sunday Telegraph found that in 2012 DfID spent almost £500 million ($764 million) on consultants, many earning six figure salaries, prompting two separate government enquiries.
Much of this money went to consultancy firms like Adam Smith International, which was paid £37 million to "promote the free market in the Third World", according to the Sunday Telegraph.
A spokeswoman for Adam Smith International said the money received from DfID had been well spent on more than 20 major projects around the world, including tax administration reform in Afghanistan.
Instead of focusing on grand academic studies favoured by think tanks, Bhalla’s work attaches more importance to solving practical problems facing ordinary people.
“Education is one of the thematic areas at Code4Kenya and we managed to get data of school results right down to the subject level," he said. "Our app can show you the performance of your school, or your child’s school, in each subject. Parents now have the information to go to parent-teacher meetings and ask questions about their child’s education."
In the face of stubborn government bureaucracy and with modest resources, Bhalla is confident this movement cannot be stopped.
“As the public and commercial demand for open data begins to gather momentum, governments will be put under more pressure to support us,” he said.
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