 Hi everyone. This is probably the worst timing slot because it's after lunch and everyone is ready to doze. I will try and not be boring. My name is Soila Kenya from Kenya. Yes, that's my real name. Catch me after this for that story. I'm from good for Africa and I'll be speaking about how we are building communities in Africa in order to contribute towards building an open database for different countries on the continent and obviously as they always say Africa is not a country so I'll be specifically talking about Kenya and Nigeria. So just oh and for anyone tweeting that's my handle I know we're trending I think in Portland. I don't know but yeah so that's my handle on Twitter. Very very briefly I'll just touch on what code for Africa is we've probably heard of some of the other code for all organizations but basically code for Africa is a civic tech and open data lab that has these labs across different cities on the continent. Some you know we exist in multiple cities in some of those countries and yes that that's very brief description but we do a lot of stuff and we deal with a lot of projects but the main thing we deal with is this which is kind of very scary especially I think for people in this room because it's like a visual representation of what we're used to seeing on the screen or you know on our laptops or whatever and I guess I should say disclaimer I'm a journalist so whatever inferences come with that yeah yay another journalist in the audience we are rare species right now but yeah will survive so this is somewhere in Nigeria in an inner government office in the I think the Ministry of Information and these are government gazettes you know important information in there but you can see where they are so this is what code for Africa is dealing with at the very base level you know digitizing dead wood by the time you know open data not to mention data had picked up and flown in the West we were still dealing with this trying to contend with you know this ganchuan task of where do you even start so one of the projects we started up is called open Africa and open Africa is simply an open data you know database available on the internet where you know any user citizen can upload their data there and have it shared so you can upload in various different formats but we of course encourage uploading in CSVs roll credits I guess and so you know we ourselves are not researchers we ourselves are not gathering data but we want the community to do so so okay data open data this concept how do you get buy-in from you know different people yes as I was mentioning you can upload your data sets literally just need to log in and register and you can start using it and then we also have data requests which is really cool and fun and you know an interesting way to interact with you know people using the site because sometimes we have a website it's like okay in this lonely corner of the internet of mine is anyone you know running across my stuff so this is a good way to see people interacting and asking for things this is just a screenshot of like some detail requests we get so it's all across the board all sorts of different things because we're literally starting from zero but yeah as I was saying how do you get buy-in from communities so one of the things we insist on is that the data we have on there is actionable so there's lots of different information on lots of different things and it would be fun to have them all online but we'd rather start with the stuff that actually would cause some change some ripple some reaction or would be useful in one way or another and that's the information we're interested in uploading on the site at least for now as we start and the best way to do that is not by us sitting in our offices thinking of you know what's actionable information it's just by getting the communities that need it to actually get it themselves and use our site in the process so you know these are just some of the communities that we've started off with and you know NGOs researchers CSOs we have a really large organization called Ilri it deals with livestock and they use our site to you know store their data that's like really interesting meaning there are people out there who are looking for places on the internet to house their data but they just don't have anywhere where you know they can do that as I said you know having a lot of these organizations just have this data but you know it's either in those files in you know physical copies which is useless I guess and you know they're doing some interesting research they would like people to find their stuff so one of the big wins we've had is specifically for journalists especially as a journalist I will be focusing on how we've managed that with journalists I think journalists are notoriously I may not say snobbish since some of them but they're like you know we know what we're doing thanks goodbye you know we don't want any new stuff even for journalistic things but we manage like a lot of those organizations you're seeing on their newsrooms media houses and how did we manage them managed to get them on board tada I'm sure we've all had of data journalism by now and it's been picking up slowly on in various countries in Africa and you know especially in Kenya in Nigeria and so we've been leveraging that to get them excited about open data and to actually start practicing you know just the basic rules of how to deal with data especially data online and so one of the other projects we have at code for Africa is called sensors Africa which is simply you know using sensors to map air quality on the continent and about you know six months after the project started the team realized okay we already have six months of data from I think it was Nairobi Kampala and Dar es Salaam and of course you know air pollution climate change all these environmental you know tracks are really good beats for journalists so we're like why don't we just start writing stories or you know we ourselves another media house so we're like okay we'll find people journalists who are interested but of course that's not going to work you can just be like here have our data they'll just look at you like what are you saying what is that you know so what we did is me and someone else just did stories because in house we do have a couple of people who are originally journalists and I wrote a story on how air pollution affects children in Nairobi because apparently it does affect even cognitive development like the brain I'm not just you know respiratory infections and things like that so I did a story on that and I won an award and the other lady also who's from Nigeria I think I have yeah this is how she also won an award so you know when we go to newsrooms because we do throughout the projects we do trainings and things like that and we tell them about how you know journalists are winning awards for writing data-driven journalism it's like that was it that was the magic thing I guess people like awards I like our words I'm guessing everyone likes our words and being recognized for things you're doing so that's apparently was the buy-in we needed and I could just fill these slides with people winning awards because especially last year 2018 we had so many people winning awards because they had now bought into this thing and of course just write one small story you go apply for all the awards that exist especially right now data journalism is such of a hot thing so there's a lot of things you know grants fellowships things going on and especially with the journalists in Nigeria Nigerians are very because you know all these countries have their own cultural you know ways they do things Nigerians buy into things very quickly they're up for anything they'll talk to you they'll respond they're just you know really active so we had so many of them win and then the Kenyans were like wait what's not happening so they wrote stories they start winning awards so it was this thing going on and in the background open Africa is like you know easily like you know stroking our cut or whatever because we've now had journalists buying into this thing called data and not only data but open data because they would put it up on our website and have all the stuff their newsroom has done surrounding data on there so we were somehow managing what we wanted to do just by finding a way to sort of interact with certain communities in this case the journalist you know journalism community and that grew into something else so we have this community that we're trying to grow in different African countries called Wanadeta and Wanadeta is a Swahili word that has two meanings Swahili is the language of Hakuna Matata I guess I don't know I think Clarence just did that famous but it means either those who own the data or children of the data so that's a lucky find on a name and basically there's a women journalist who work with data and who do data driven stories and that's how you know this lady Tobore also got involved she was a Wanadeta and so you know we have this whole network that's now writing data stories and therefore using open data it's super exciting I myself I'm a Wanadeta I think I was the first one like before we had a website or anything and it's so exciting to see more and more people we meet every month in various countries we have meetups in Nairobi, Kampala, I think Joburg, Lagos, Abuja Benin and it's growing really fast in just one year we've existed for pretty much one year and we've had all this traction we also use our Haksakas communities Haksakas is basically you know techies and journalists coming together to discuss interesting stuff our most recent Haksakas in Nairobi was a script platform where we script data that one of our community media houses needed that data for something for a story they were doing and we helped them script it so you know the sort of just fulfilling and you know taking many boxes with one thing and then everyone goes home happy and outside of the communities that have been built around it we now have had a few other things going on so an example is a project that WannaData took up very early on in its existence where we simply took gender data from the World Economic Forum they have this gender pay gap report every year and we used it to build a website where you can put in you can choose the African country that you're from put in a salary put in your gender and you see what the other gender and in you know in contrast so of course overwhelmingly women and women and less so it's really striking to see that visually because if I tell you that women in Kenya and 55% less than men that's very abstract and like no one knows what 55% is but if you see the bars and the thing is halfway and you're like wait so we've had such you know sort of it's sort of a journalistic thing but a techie thing at the same time so we've had such project and then we've also had other websites being built of this one such as Taquimu which is basically data but specifically development data for countries we have about 10 African countries on there and you find it's it's mainly for people who are interested in development in those countries so it has very basic information about their politics economics and things like that so that you know people within those communities can see that data and start making informed decisions and you know move forward change in their communities then lastly we built a MOOC which has among other things you know data journalism and stuff like that but as open Africa we're like we have to take this opportunity so we built a couple of courses surrounding open data and we've been sort of you know going around to newsrooms and journalism schools training and then we throw in you know open data in there talk a bit about it you know tell you know just the usual sort of coaxing that we've realized we need to do in order to sort of build that community and get people so we don't upload it as just them and so that's that's basically what you've been doing and so this is in Kenya now this is an office in Kenya of land title deeds in an office somewhere and I mean it's the same situation it's quite big it's quite huge but what you've been able to do is take that nearly vertical cliff and sort of you know incline it just a bit to be a more like we can at least you know crawl up it one step at a time and yeah that's it