Celebrating International Right to Know Day 2015
September 28th is International Right to Know Day when data activists and information campaigners around the world unite to remind everyone of the benefits that the free exchange of information brings to societies.
At Code for Africa, we believe every citizen has the right to freely and easily access public information from their governments and lawmakers. And we’ve created several platforms which make information more available so that people can discover, read and reuse it for civic purposes.
sourceAFRICA is an open repository of thousands of public documents which have been made searchable and embeddable for anyone to read and reuse for free. The site is powered by DocumentCloud and now contains over 10,000 documents including years’ worth of Kenyan and Mozambican gazettes, South African court documents and information released as part of a series of investigative reports and found no-where else online.
openAFRICA is the largest independent open data portal in Africa with over 1,700 datasets from countries across the continent. The portal is powered by the open source CKAN software platform, and is used by organisations as diverse as the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) and African Network of Centres for Investigative Reporting (ANCIR) to make their data more publicly accessible. All the datasets on openAFRICA are free to reuse, recycle or republish for anyone wishing to work with open data.
connectedAFRICA is a platform to explore the links between politics, power and money by combining company information with parliamentary records, gazettes and court documents. The platform allows anyone to get insights into more than 8,000 politically connected people in South Africa. Data from Kenya and Nigeria is being added to create similar transparency there. The tools used to build the resource form part of Code for Africa’s Grano Project and the tools are open source and free to reuse in other countries.
africanSPENDING maps out the ways in which public data can be used to improve the way citizens understand how governments spend our money through data-driven analysis and visualisation. AfricanSpending also features a survey of budget-related initiatives, projects and datasets in African countries.
All of these projects are open source and information is published using Creative Commons licences so that anyone can freely reuse our work, visualisations or code.
