Liberating Uganda’s census data for journalism
It is a warm evening in Kampala, Uganda. Up-to twenty journalists are seated in a small room with white walls, the air conditioning turned on to keep the room as cool as possible. The only voice that can heard beyond the small white walls is one of the public relations officer from Uganda Bureau of Statistics, who is sharing about the statistical abstract report for the Uganda Census 2014. He is concluding his presentation that has been on-going for the last one hour with a call for journalists to use the census data in their journalism for story telling. He shares that this is the last phase of the census, dissemination. Dissemination of census data cannot be done without the help of journalists to put meaning to it. It can answer questions like how population density affects the environment, how population increase affects administrative structures and service delivery, the implication of population increase to Ugandans where ten million people younger than ten (10) years have been added in the last twelve years.
A new initiative by the Code for Uganda team seeks to address just that. The Open Government fellowship seeks to work with journalists in Uganda, equip them with data-driven journalism skills as they push to use the census data in their reporting. The open government fellows will liberate the census data, clean and upload it to a Uganda Instance of Wazimap where it can be visualised in a simple and easy to use interface. It can also be accessed by journalists in an embeddable format, providing a rich and deep context in one glance. The OpenGov Fellowships are a continental initiative of the Code for Africa(CfAfrica) federation, with fellows currently helping liberate data or build better digital democracies in Ghana, Nigeria, Rwanda, South Africa and Uganda
The African Center for Media Excellence released an Election media monitoring report in January 2016 that clearly indicated that the reporting approach for Ugandan media houses was mainly conventional reporting (>70%). The limited use of data journalism can be attributed to a number of factors that may include cost, and even skill-set. With the growth of digital properties, newsrooms are now needed more than ever to push the boundaries from conventional reporting to providing insights around the issues people care deeply about.
The technical open government fellows have liberated most of the Uganda census data released for 2014. They have also taken the privilege of adding data on how the population voted in the 2016 elections and the setup of households from the 2002 census. Our Open Government journalism fellows are using investigative reporting to write stories from the census data and other datasets like Uganda’s forest cover, energy distribution to mention but a few.
The importance of tools like Wazimap and data-driven journalism approaches can be validated through a number of examples. The Daily Maverick in South Africa referenced the Wazimap on the dire housing conditions in the area of Dunoon during protests there. There is also the use of open data by the guardian in the US to track police killings, to the recently leaked panama papers that illustrate how the rich and famous store their money in tax havens.
WAZImap, which was built by CfSA (Code For South Africa) in partnership with Media Monitoring Africa with seed funding from CfAfrica (Code For Africa), converts complex census and other demographic data into an easy-to-navigate tool that helps citizens explore their own neighborhoods. The tool has been so successful, it is now being replicated in Kenya, Nigeria, and Uganda.
This Code for Uganda initiative is part of the larger Code for Africa, a people driven movement that seeks to empower active citizenry and strengthen civic watchdogs to help governments shape and improve services to its people.
The open government fellows will also work with the local Hacks/Hackers Kampala chapter in order to support local journalists on how to use the local Wazimap instance, how to work with data in order to develop solutions.
The fellows that will undertake this initiative include:
Collins Rukundo
Collins is an Actuarial Scientist by profession. He has spent a vast amount of time working with civic organisations in order to support them with civic technologies. He is currently supporting the Center for Policy Analysis on their Parliament Watch Uganda project, which tracks Uganda’s parliament.
Kenneth Matovu
Kenneth is a tech enthusiast with extensive experience in software development and management. Kenneth founded and works as a creatives lead at Sombil, a software development consultancy. Kenneth is very passionate about good governance, open systems and open data.
Richard Zulu
Richard is the founder and lead at Outbox, a Google for Entrepreneurs partner hub that supports new and upcoming African entrepreneurs interested in using technology with workspace, mentorship, and training programs. Outbox also works with organisations interested in leveraging mobile and web products in their work.
Richard Zulu has also consulted with a global design firm, IDEO.ORG where he supported with the Amplify challenge as the Uganda In-country manager. The amplify challenge is a series of 10 design and innovation challenges sponsored by the UK’s Department for International Development. The focus of the initiative is to take a Human Centered design approach to solving these global challenges.
Richard Zulu has a Bachelor’s Degree in Information Technology from Makerere University, Kampala, Uganda.
He is also an East African Acumen Fellow 2014.
Raymond Mujuni
Mujuni Raymond Qatahar is an investigative journalist in East Africa currently working with NTV Uganda, a market-leading broadcast TV under the Nation Media Group.
He has investigated some of the Country’s most intriguing stories.
In 2012, he investigated the irregularities in the appointment process of the managing director at National Water and Sewerage Corporation.The investigation would later spark parliamentary debate on the matter leading to a probe of the process by the IGG who also found the process wanting.
In 2013, he penned down an investigative feature on the illegal trade in Gold by Ugandans in the DRC. In the months following the feature, the United Nations blacklisted three Ugandan families over their involvement in the trade of illegal gold.
In the same year, Raymond exposed the continued crackdown of Rwandan asylum seekers in Uganda. It is his story that brought to light the involvement of the Uganda Police in the illegal monitoring, threatening and eventual extradition of the asylum seekers without due process.
He won an African Center For Media Excellence Journalism grant to investigate the Rwenzururu Killings in which over 200 people lost their lives.
Carol Natukunda
Carol Natukunda is a journalist with the Vision group where she writes about public health issues and education. During her career, she has been nominated for the prestigious CNN Multichoice African Journalism Award 2013. She has also won the African Center for Media Excellence (ACME) education reporting award 2016. Carol was also nominated for the ACME Journalism award on explanatory reporting.
Edgar Raymond Batte
Edgar Batte is a senior staff correspondent with the New Vision with a focus on in-depth reporting. A graduate of Mass Communication at Makerere University, Edgar started out as a photo journalist. He is a winner of the 2007 Golden Pen award for Art and Culture. He is also a winner for the Afrika Divas award under the best entertainment category. Edgar is an overall winner Sports Journalist of the Year in Uganda National Journalism Awards 2013/14 and runner up Health Journalist of the Year in Uganda National Journalist Awards 2013/14.
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About Code for Africa
Code for Africa (CfAfrica) is the continent’s largest independent open data and civic technology initiative. It operates as a federation of autonomous country-based digital innovation organisations that support ‘citizen labs’ in five countries and major projects in a further 15 countries.
CfAfrica runs Africa’s OpenGov Fellowships and also embeds Innovation Fellows into newsrooms and social justice organisations to help liberate data of public interest, or to build tools that help empower citizens.
In addition to fellowships and citizen labs, CfAfrica runs the $1 million per year #innovateAFRICA fund and the $500,000 per year #impactAFRICA fund, which award seed grants to civic pioneers for experiments with everything from camera drones and environmental sensors, to encryption for whistleblowers and data-driven semantic analysis tools for investigative watchdogs.
CfAfrica also curates continental resources such as the africanSPENDING portal of budget transparency resources, the openAFRICA data portal, the sourceAFRICA document repository, and the connectedAFRICA transparency toolkit for tracking the often hidden social networks and economic interests in politics. CfAfrica is an initiative of the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ).
