 Good morning everyone and thanks for joining so early in the morning and this being the first session. There's like a lot of pressure Okay, so my name is Trisha as she mentioned and I'll be talking about opening up African data So this talk was actually meant to be presented by my colleague in my keysa But due to visa constraints, she was unable to join us So I just really hope I can do justice to showcase the real hard work She's put through in her project open Africa Okay, a bit about me. My name is Trisha. I Work for a non-profit organization called code for Africa where I'm the senior data product manager and I manage the Organizations data lab. I come from a city called Durban, which is found on the east coast of South Africa Took me about 32 hours to get here. Well, I'm just so excited to be up. Okay So I love data. I love visualizations. I love maps. I love hackathons So if you have a hackathon, please invite me, okay Yeah, but most importantly what I love is the impact that data can have in Africa and not only in Africa being here it's it's the first time I'm on in the South America and It actually shows me that Africa, you know, they also always mention the global South So problems you see in Africa. I'm seeing similar issues here in Argentina So data has this Has the can make this impact in the global South So I just want to take a look at how code for Africa Creates change and impact. Okay, so code for Africa. We also known as CFA We're the continent's largest civic technology Organization and we work on data journalism and open data projects to name a few Okay We have our team comprises Journalists data analysts technologists designers distributed all through the African continent We have various initiatives so one of them being one a data and One a data is a network of women only journalists data scientists designers Technologists, okay, then interesting we have a network called African drone and They use drone technology for mapping and storytelling Another program at the organization is called sensors Africa and what they do is They build and deploy a quality sensors that now collects data We also have a PESA check team. So this is our fact-checking initiative and they operate in 13 countries and they conduct a lot of fact checks and Lastly, we have an iLab team that does forensic investigations such as social media investigations Let's look at some of the data challenges that we are facing in Africa and maybe many of you can relate to it This is our reality So often data is very difficult to find If we do find data by any chance It's either stuck on a website and you can't get it out or it's stuck in a PDF report and then you have to scrape it Then you get a scenario as these pictures So these are actually the government Gazette offices in Kenya and Nigeria These files or hard copy documents you see they they are actually broken shelves and leaking roofs and These documents are actually government Gazettes Another issue that we face is data sharing and it's not only on the African continent, but internationally as well so because I'm a data person and when I read a new story and A journalist is quoting a statistic Okay, I'm always interested to know where did this come from? I want to read further about it Okay, so sometimes they do mention they'll say a report from the World Health Organization Okay Sometimes they state the exact name of the report If we lucky really lucky they will hyperlink to that report But often when it's hyperlinked you click on the link you get a full for error Or you get some sort of error that this file does not exist. Okay? so What we're doing at open I mean what we're doing at code for Africa is we built a tool called Open Africa that's meant to help solve this problem when Africa is Africa's largest volunteer driven open data portal So it's built on C. Can and I've yesterday. I've heard so many people speak about C. Can and D. Can So yeah, it was built in C. Can and I think it was built in 2014 or 2015 so it's a quite a while ago. Okay The the purpose of open Africa is for us to reuse and and share data So for example Kenya has an annual economic survey report that they publish Now this report has loads and loads of important data indicators The issue is it's only in a PDF So me if I am doing an investigation or story if I'm just working with that data And I'm interested in a specific data set for example Healthcare workers. Okay, I'll then go in and I'll scrape the data But I'm a bit more of an advanced data user I have the skill set to allow me to scrape the data. I can use tabular and other tools So once I have that data, I can get it into my spreadsheet From my spreadsheet, I can conduct my analysis. I can create my visualization You know, I'm a happy chap and Then what I further do is I share that data or upload that data to open Africa So now if if anyone else is interested in that data on healthcare workers in Kenya They don't need to go through all the steps that I went through to go and scrape that data And maybe they don't even have that skills they can simply download the data and use it for their further analysis in This way we are sharing data and reusing data in Quite a productive way We have a few main users of open Africa. This also won an award. It won the 2021 Sigma Awards and it was the first African project to ever win the Sigma Awards Okay, like I said, open Africa was built around 2015 Okay So we have a we have a future plan in mind Okay, let me just go through a few future steps and after this or even if we have time now Because I know a lot of people are working on open data portals I'd love to hear your thoughts on how we can improve the product Okay, future parents we have a basic three-step plan So firstly to scrape clean and upload So we we continuously want to do this get more data up on various topics, but in particular elections We aspire open Africa to be an African election data monitor So your one-stop place for election data Then our next step is tell and by tell I mean we want to create an insights blog And in that insights blog we want to take a particular data set from open Africa And write about how it can be used Or write about how it has been used For our users to get an understanding of the power of data It's not just a csv document sitting in there But tell them what can you do with it? And lastly use We want the data on the platform to be used in more impact driven projects by not only our organizer Organization but also our partners We'd also absolutely love to have an intensive campaign on open data And why sharing data is important with particular attention to open Africa We're also in the middle of a redesign because I mean What is design in 2015 does not look great right now So we're really looking forward to that as well Okay, so if you want to know more about code for Africa's open data projects, just give us a follow on twitter And yeah, let's go for some questions And I ask that you speak in the mic so that it can be recorded Is data acquisition Do you allow other repositories to harvest data from open Africa for discoverability of your content? Yeah, we do have the ccan api that people request for And we do give them access to that. Yeah. Yes. Yes So so another thing to that is what we try to do as well is reverse We try to get their data. But the issue is if That gets broken quite easily So we have a bunch of broken harvesters that we need to fix Are you finding out if they don't for example, everybody sites data should So how else are you information about what people are doing with your data so that you can share that so I'll let you answer from there. I don't have to yeah So impact reporting is something that we also want to try and get down to Because what we notice is that people so we have we use google analytics and it tells us the most Downloaded data set et cetera, but we're not seeing The output where are they using the data? And we were thinking of having a survey. So when you're downloading the data have a survey Um oxing what do you want to use the data for? Problem is the survey has to be optional Because if you tell them if you only only uh, you'll only get the data if you're filling the survey That does not make it open data because you're restricting access So you have to make the survey optional But are many people going to fill in something that's optional? That's an that's another problem. Yeah About Makoko Makoko and remember Uh, you people living in that area if they wanted their Plays, I mean their place to be mapped and I'm thinking about potential violent conflicts or other reasons why they wouldn't want their Home or houses or businesses to be mapped. Um, maybe they don't have internet. They don't use it themselves How do you manage that part? You know, okay? So this is a very interesting and complex situation We had a team member go in and do community Negotiation he had to go have meetings with the chief On multiple occasions because you can't just go within Africa within villages You can't just go in and do what you want. You need to negotiate with chiefs You have to have town hall meetings. There's like, um I wouldn't like to use we didn't really like pay them but they expect like some sort of Like gift, you know that you take to them They were very happy about it because the place was not on a map And if you're not in the map government is not taking you Holding I mean is not taking you into account when it comes to planning There was also a lot of eviction taking place In the place because literally they were invisible and the city was just like we don't want to see you because you're a slum So by putting the people on the map it brought visibility to them And they can be counted for and government can then provide Services for them. Yeah We have one minute. We're okay. All right. Thank you so much Thank you so much