Getting ahead of the curve on Covid-19
Africa’s largest open data + civic technology network partners with continental digital archive for scientific research to mitigate coronavirus effects.
Does one size fit all? How should Africa, with its fragile healthcare systems, crowded settlements and large informal economies tailor global strategies for fighting Covid-19 to ensure they are feasible or effective locally? African policymakers and health agencies need evidence-based insights with strong local context to make informed decisions. They are, however, struggling to find detailed local data or analysis.
The continent’s largest network of open data analysts and civic technologists, Code For Africa (CfA), and open source African scientific researchers have therefore partnered to support African efforts to get ahead of the curve, by helping surface actionable local data and credible local scientific research.
The partnership will include expert analysis by the CfA-affiliated Takwimu, on the political economy and development policy impacts, and will also leverage partnerships with the world’s leading preprint repositories for scientific research, namely the Open Science Framework (OSF), ScienceOpen and Zenodo. Together, the partners will:
- Digitise and publish local Africa-specific data and scientific research to help planners better understand which specific communities, infrastructure and/or services are most vulnerable to Covid-19, and what countermeasures might be most effective;
- Debunk the most harmful misinformation and quackery, that has become a tsunami or ‘infodemic’ on social media and that is blunting public efforts to tackle Covid-19. The partners will do this by fact-checking misleading memes and claims, as part of a wider CfA partnership with Facebook and WhatsApp, while simultaneously amplifying the voices of credible African scientific researchers, and empowering African newsrooms and social media influencers to fight misinformation with facts and compelling storytelling;
- Connect African researchers and experts to change-makers in government, the media and at development, to help improve the appropriateness and relevance of plans or interventions, as well as to bolster evidence-based public discourse.
The partners will kickstart the collaboration by combining their resources to establish a central portal for scholarly resources such as research articles, datasets and explanatory infographics. CfA’s data teams will help compile and standardise the data resources, while open science activists will coordinate expert teams to screen the literature for relevance and usefulness, so as to help reduce the “firehose” of often irrelevant, outdated or misleading information available to planners.
The initiative will promote standards that ensure African data collected on Covid-19 aligns to F.A.I.R. (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) and C.A.R.E (collective benefit, authority to control, responsibility, ethics) principles.
The partnership will tap into CfA’s network of more than 50 mainstream partner newsrooms, and wider African media industry associations, to encourage evidence-driven public discourse, while simultaneously boosting similar science communication initiatives at organisations such as the Kenya-based Training Centre for Science Communication (TCC Africa), the African Science Initiative (Ghana), the Nigeria-based African Science Literacy Network and Vilsquare research and development centre, as well as the African chapter of the globally operating Open Science Hardware (AfricaOSH) community.
“Planners are working in the dark, with no real actionable data on which communities are most vulnerable, or where to bolster infrastructure and support services. Where there is data, it is often fragmented or offline. We’re aiming to help pull it together, as a freely available public resource,” says CfA chief executive, Justin Arenstein. “We’re also aiming for insights into what has and has not worked before, in other similar health emergencies across Africa.”
“Context matters. Parachuted in ‘solutions’ are dangerous if you don’t understand cultural nuance. We are therefore working with CfA on surfacing Africa-specific scientific research along with local experts to help local planners and the media better understand the underlying dynamics that contribute to the spread of the virus,” says AfricArXiv advisor, Obasegun Ayodele.
Scientists working on topics directly related to the African regional context, from any discipline, who want to contribute to the initiative can submit Covid-19 relevant research and information, including peer-reviewed work on previous epidemics like Ebola, Zika, and other viral epidemics, as a text document (pre-print, post-print), data set, presentation (PDF, PPT), poster or infographic (PNG, PDF) at info.africarxiv.org/submit/.
About Code for Africa
Code for Africa (CfA) is the continent’s largest network of civic technology and data journalism labs, with teams in 12 countries. CfA builds digital democracy solutions that give citizens unfettered access to actionable information that empowers them to make informed decisions, and that strengthens civic engagement for improved public governance and accountability. This includes building infrastructure like the continent’s largest open data portals at openAFRICA and sourceAFRICA, as well as incubating initiatives as diverse as the africanDRONE network, the PesaCheck fact-checking initiative and the sensors.AFRICA air quality sensor network. CfA also manages that African Network of Centres for Investigative Reporting (ANCIR), which gives the continent’s best muckraking newsrooms the best possible forensic forensic data tools, digital security and whistleblower encryption to help improve their ability to tackle crooked politicians, organised crime and predatory big business. CfA also runs one of Africa’s largest skills development initiatives for digital journalists, and seed funds cross-border collaboration.
CfA Contact: hello@codeforafrica.org (Justin Arenstein, Chris Roper, Amanda Strydom)
About AfricArXiv
AfricArxiv is a free, open source and community-led digital archive for African research. We provide a non-profit platform for African scientists to upload their working papers, preprints, accepted manuscripts (post-prints), and published papers. We also provide options to link data and code, and for article versioning. AfricArxiv is dedicated to speeding and opening up research and collaboration among African scientists and helping to build the future of scholarly communication.
AfricArXiv Contact: info@africarxiv.org (Jo Havemann, Louise Bezuidenhout, Obasegun Ayodele)
