Kenyan media houses and open governance advocates are to establish a task force to promote data-driven journalism after it emerged that the government's online open data portal is underutilised.
The Kenyan government launched a portal, called the Kenya Open Data Initiative (KODI), in July last year, making Kenya the first sub-Saharan country to do so. Available data includes national census data and other statistics covering health, education and land.
Stakeholders have raised concern that the provided data has not been used by journalists. It has resolved to establish a task force urgently, though no exact timeline or details as to the body's make-up have yet been announced.
Kenya's permanent secretary for the ministry of information and communications, Bitange Ndemo, raised the concern that the 350 detailed datasets on public expenditure, demographic trends and service delivery were not being used by the media, technologists and the wider public.
He said the open data portal provided important information that needed to be properly disseminated.
“The KODI initiative provides the foundation for a knowledge economy. It also gives you the material and the tools to be more scientific in your reporting on issues. Evidence-based analysis by the media is more likely to influence the manner in which [government] decisions are made and policies are oriented than purely speculative reporting,” Ndemo told media executives.
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Amadou Mahtar Ba, CE of media facilitators African Media Initiative (AMI), said the proposed task force would allow Kenyan media owners and executives to explore some of the opportunities open data provides by identifying possible pilot projects as well as researching use-cases, developing training for news managers and producers, and convening more focused strategy sessions with key stakeholders. AMI will facilitate the task force.
CEOs and board directors of Kenya's largest media groups made the call for an industry-wide drive to evaluate new digital journalism tools during a strategy roundtable jointly convened by the AMI and World Bank Institute in Nairobi on 24 January.
The stakeholders said data journalism would “strengthen the media's ability to focus its reportage on the real issues, instead of just the personalities”.
Kenya has been recognised for its initiative to make the data accessible. The World Bank's Nairobi-based senior social development specialist, Christopher Finch, said Kenya's release of government data six months ago, via a centralised open data portal, is already being emulated by countries as far away as Moldova.
Finch urged Kenya's local media to embrace KODI as a key tool to improve the depth and context of reportage. He also urged the media to build their own tools or platforms to help the wider public use KODI data in their day-to-day lives in order to understand the society they live in.
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