 Hi everyone, my name is Sarah Jambirono. I am a developer advocate at Code for Africa and it's really good to have all of you come. Thank you for sitting in for this session. So just a bit of background. Code for Africa is a civic tech organization that works to empower citizens by giving them access to actionable information. And in just a few minutes I'm going to show you exactly how one of the ways that we do this. So we've had a wonderful two days here. We've learned quite a lot of things. We've shared knowledge, we've drawn our insights and I think my mandate here this afternoon is to challenge and encourage and implore us to build more tools that directly impact the communities that we live in. And if possible, if these tools can be replicated elsewhere around the world, then even better. And so I'm going to talk about life and death decisions powered by CSVs. And I'm going to talk about one specific tool that we built in Kenya called Dodgy Doctors. So this is a problem that we have. At access to proper healthcare is a basic human right. And while that is true, the World Health Organization estimates that about a third of the world's population has no access to even the most basic medicines that the people need. And this essentially means that every year we lose about four million people just because we can't give them access to basic healthcare. And so in Kenya, quark doctors are very common. And I have two stories to illustrate just how dire the situation is. And the first story is about my boss, Justin Einstein, who's from South Africa. And in one of his business trips to Kenya, which is where they could for Africa offices are, he got really sick and sought medical advice. And he actually got treated and he felt better. And after his business trip, he went back to South Africa. But then the problem came when, when he went back to South Africa, he got even worse. And he visited his regular family doctor. And as protocol will suggest, the South African doctor requested to see medical records from his treatment in Kenya. And so when the South African doctor's office contacted the Kenyan doctor's office, the Kenyan doctor's assistant was like, are you sure that this is the person that treated you because this is a vet? Yeah, my boss had been treated by a vet. And it's actually really funny. We can laugh about it now because he's well and he lived to tell the story. But the truth of the matter is a lot of the people in rural Africa and most of Southeast Asia are not able to, you know, live and tell the story. They're either visiting quack doctors at any given time or they're getting misdiagnosed, you know? And so even for the population that is able to access healthcare, how sure are they that they're being treated by registered practitioners, you know? And how sure are they that they've been treated in registered clinics that are legal, that are operating legally? So this is why in 2013 Code for Africa in partnership with one of the largest, with the largest blue-collar newspaper in Kenya, known as the STAR, built a simple suite of web-based and SMS applications to help people do three things. One, check whether the doctor was a registered practitioner. And the second thing, check whether the national health insurance covers their treatment at any given hospital. And if it doesn't, how much does it cover and how much do they need to top up? Just so people don't get embarrassed at the hospital or don't get turned away and, you know, maybe die just because they weren't able to prepare well in advance when they went to hospital. And the third thing it does is, because Kenya is big and sometimes you go to some parts of your country that you've never been to before and you don't know people and if you or your child gets sick, then what happens, you know? So it allows you to just enter the name of a town that you've gone to and it gives you a list of, it gives you a list of medical practitioners that you can go see and what their specialty is and clinics that you can go to. So I give you one story. My second story, which is going to explain and expound why the STAR Health, this health portal became very famous around the end of last year is actually a very sad story. So in September of last year, a woman went to the police and she reported a case where she had been drugged and dripped by an alleged gynaecologist. And so when she came out and the story was somehow reported in the news, then many more women came out and said they'd also been drugged and dripped by the same practitioner. And so when he was investigated, they actually discovered he was a quack doctor. He wasn't even registered to practice and he had this clinic just in a town somewhere that wasn't even operating legally. And just because he put up a sign with his name and his specialty, then people had trusted him with their lives. And many women had gotten it and he got arrested. And this generated a public outcry. And as a result of this, the STAR started publicizing the platform and a lot of people used it. I think in a span of three months, over 14,000 unique visits were recorded on the platform. And this was really good because all of a sudden, people were coming onto the platform and asking, let me make sure that the person who's been treating me or the person that I'm suddenly going to visit is someone I can trust with my life. And so where did we get the data? So in Kenya, we have a Kenya medical and dentists, Kenya medical practitioners and dentists board. And they publish a whole list of all registered doctors who studied in Kenya and who studied abroad and have been registered to practice in Kenya. They publish it in, let's say, over 300, I think, yes, over 300 web pages. So each web page has at least of 30 doctors in it, which isn't really ideal. And I mean, if I was someone who wanted to, you know, find out where I said, let's say I had a feature phone, what would I do? Because this is a truth. Yes, mobile phone prevalence in Africa is amazing. Stats put it at over 80% in Kenya alone. But then the reality is that much as mobile prevalence is that high, a lot of people still have feature phones, you know? And so a lot of content that exists on websites, still can't be accessed by a majority of the population. And this is why the Star Health portal was a really good sell to people because just by typing out your doctor's name and sending that to a short code service, then you're able to get an SMS back saying, yes, Sarah is a registered pediatrician, for example, and this is her number and this is where she practices from. So you're able to tell is the clinic I'm practicing from, you know, like registered, am I a registered doctor? So we took data out of this. We built a scraper around it and collected all the data out of the webpages on this site and we put it in a spreadsheet. And that was it. And so we decided to build a simple platform just to act as a buoy for this spreadsheet. So people could query it and find out whatever it is they wanted to know. And then, so we did that. And just to create a crowd verification sort of system because a doctor could come and say, hey, you spelt my name wrongly. And so this is why people are not able to find me like in the SMS app or the web app that you guys have. We hosted it on Google Fusion tables and these cards make it very easy for people to, these cards make it very easy for doctors, for example, to come back and say, so I see my address here and what it reads isn't what it currently is. So I moved to places, my address changed. So they are able to then suggest edits either here and email address send us an email and say, so my records are right and we are able to reach out to KMPDB or they're able to reach out to the medical practitioners both directly and say to them, hey, you need to change my records because they don't read right. And so it creates a sort of like virtual circle where at least we don't just give to community or we don't just take from the government like the data that they're giving but we also give back to them by making sure that their records are up to date or that they are correct even, which is really important if you ask me. And so some of the things that have come out of this have been that last year, before the Star Health started reporting and promoting the platform, then they used to get about 20 requests per day on the site, but now they record up to 215 SMSs a day like two people querying a platform to see what has details, details about clinics and all these things and that's really cool because it started out as a data experiment for the newsroom but it's now become one of the main revenue sources, which is really awesome. Something else that came out of this was that in February, the Star Health was running one of the promotional material on radio and one of the main board members at Kenya Medical Practitioners Board had the advertisement during rush hour and so it led to a series of meetings and after that the government actually demanded that all boards that were responsible for registering health practitioners should create SMS tools around the databases that they have so that citizens can query their databases and find out if all health practitioners are registered, which is such a big win for us. I mean, we've already done it but that the government saw a need to demand that each of these boards do that as a must have, then I think that's a major win because we are driving change in the community. Just by building a very simple tool out of data that was readily available but wasn't accessible by all, then it created a demand for even better services by the people that offer the services and that's a major win. So some of the issues that we've come by that we've realized as more and more people have continued to use this spreadsheet based app. One of them has been that we need to have a system that lets us know where the red flags are and what I mean by this is who are these doctors that people keep searching for but getting no results for, you know? Because the minute we know who these are, that's where the stories are because that's how we were able to even create more impact by outing them and getting them into jail or wherever it is there should be. Currently we have no system to do that but we think it's really important to have that and so that's something that we are actively working on at the moment. Another thing we are hoping to have is just a system. There's something that was done by Code for South Africa recently which is a cohort under the umbrella of Code for Africa and something they've been able to do is to find out what the regulatory body places medicine crisis at. So how much should medicines cost to be savvy? How much are people buying them at in pharmacies? And they've been able to build a platform that then shows people you're either overpaying for your medicines or you're underpaying and your medicines are either generic or they have generics in them or they do not. And that's something we are hoping to do. The only downside is that our regulatory body in Kenya hasn't released this data yet and so even if we find it we might not be able to use it cause it's not yet open but we are hoping that because more and more everyday government surprise us and they open up data that we recently didn't know they were going to open up. So we are hoping that they will do this for us. A major win with Star Health has been that in January of this year it was replicated by a newsroom in Nigeria and it is now being used in exactly the same way it's been used in Kenya. They've taken it up and they are using it and they also have the medicine prizes too on it as well because they have the medicine prizes published by the regulatory body and this data is open and so they have all of that. Yes, so thank you. Having taken the data from the... Kenya Medical Practitioners and Dentists Board. Thank you, yes. It's quite a mouthful. You said you had to do quite a lot of work to scrape that and put it into a usable form. Do you make that data available as well as publishing the site that allows you to query it? Yes, so the data itself is available and I can point you to the GitHub page in a bit and I also forgot to mention that the simple GUI that you built around the spreadsheets, we actually did that in Laravel. It's simple, it works for us. So how do people actually submit the names after you go to the website to do it? No, no, no. So this is how the SMS works. So on your phone you just type out the SMS and we give you a short code and so you send the SMS through the short code and so the minute you send it, so it just queries the system and it charges you. Sadly, it's not free, you still pay for this which is still a small charge. So it sends you back an SMS with the information saying, Ada, we found the name, here it is. And the good thing about the SMS service, initially we had an issue where if someone had spelled out doctor as DR rather than the full name doctor then it will bring an error. But we, in our test phase, we realized we had to change that. So whether you type out doctor, D, space, whatever, it just gives correct results. What it looks at is the names, yeah. And sometimes a name might be complicated and so someone might misspell the name. So what it does is if it doesn't find the exact name but a majority of the characters are similar then it gives you back the results that are very similar to what you were trying to type out. Just giving room for human error at this point, yeah. There's also another issue that we realized in working with this data. The data base only has 11,000, a little bit over 11,000 doctors. Either we really don't have doctors in Kenya because there's 44 million people against 11,000 doctors which means there's such great need, no? Or that not all doctors are registered. And so wherever the disparity is, I mean that's a story that's how much you look into, you know, yeah. So it's actually really shocking for every 4,000 people, there should be one doctor. So it's either true or most people haven't graduated or aren't registered. Although the board insists that they update their data on a weekly basis. And something else they've started doing right now on their site is publishing medical exam results on their site so people can track progress, you know, for medical students, which is interesting and awesome at the same time. Yeah, it seems like you've now got a normal set. You could do a look at the, what pockets of the area in the country don't have representation as well? Yes, that's true. There's also a lot of issues around how doctors get immunogenic and like hardship areas and people not wanting to go out there and opt in for private practice. It's a lot of issues, yeah. Yes. Now that you've just scraped all the data, how do you keep it up to date? So what happens with the scrapers is they are automated. So they keep out escaping this data on a weekly basis. But in January of this year, we realized, it was January of February, we realized that the scrapers were not up to date themselves and so like they hadn't been updating the data. And so that's something we become aware of and have had to go back time and again just to make sure they are working and the data is being updated. Have you reached out to that organization to see if they'd be willing to just give you like a data dump or anything or did they just want you to scrape the website? So when this guy's had the advert on radio, about, there's actually a whole hashtag going on. It's called dodgy doctors and there's another Swahili one called Chunga Doctorate Bandia. It means beware of fake doctors and those are really, they're a big hit in Kenya. So when they had this campaign on radio, they actually called us because they were aware of what you were doing before and they said, so the guy we had actually been working with was like, I don't know you guys. We need to get all government boards to do their own SNS services. And so Cathy Angisha, who's a cook for Kenya, it actually went and talked to them and tried to build a partnership with them but it's really important to them that they build a standalone SNS service as an example to other health practitioners so they can all have their own SNS services. So it's a bit more complicated than we thought it would be but still because the data is available online, we'll still keep using the scrapers for now. So yes, we've tried and sadly no, we, they can't give it to us. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you.