New tool to aid storytellers in Kenya with budget and census data
Journalists, researchers and activists can easily access datasets and dataviz on PesaYetu
Looking for an easy-to-use data and visualisation tool to help you quickly find, analyse and interpret complex budget data? PesaYetu is an interactive website designed specifically to easily identify and track promises made by county government officials.
With PesaYetu, you can explore, interpret and report on data-driven stories affecting the community. The tool is aimed at storytellers to help empower citizens wanting to engage their leaders on issues concerning policy and governance at the county level.
The tool was recently launched by Code for Africa (CfA) in partnership with Kenya Community Media Network, Catholic Media Council (CAMECO), and the German Cooperation in a bid to make data more accessible.
Tricia Govindasamy, senior data product manager at Code for Africa, says the tool will help journalists, activists and researchers in Kenya who want to transform their work with in-depth county-specific information. “ The goal is to create an easy-to-use interface to encourage an informed and participatory citizenry that can be a force for good in their societies,” she said.
The Constitution of Kenya (2010) created a decentralised government system where legislative and executive power is shared between the national government and the 47 counties. Managing the country’s resources comes with a greater need for accountability but, like many other African countries, county government data is often inaccessible.
“We created PesaYetu to help spur the adoption of data-driven digital journalism tools and techniques, and in order to improve local evidence-driven analysis and multimedia reporting on development issues,” said Govindasamy.
Key features on the site include an interactive map showing counties whose data is available, a search box, as well as documents, datasets and data-driven stories published by partners. There is also a rich data function, which is a space to interact with various charts and visualised data, a pin and compare function to select two counties for data comparison, downloadable charts in various formats, a share function, and a help function for more information.
The tool was created using liberated data from the County Integrated Development Plans (CIDP) “We had to scrape hundreds of tables of data from PDF reports and this was complicated because each county reported data differently. One county may publish data, for example, on the number of children enrolled in private schools and another may publish data on the number of children in high schools, which makes comparing data difficult,” Govindasamy said.
Inconsistencies in the data provided another challenge for the team. Budget figures weren’t adding up and there was no metadata available to verify abbreviations. Granular project and budget data weren’t straightforward to clean and visualise. Additionally, project and government departments had lengthy names.
In order to make fuller sense of the numbers and to standardise reporting, our data scientists were required to dig deeper to cross reference findings by searching through a range of publications.
The launch of PesaYetu comes on top of efforts by Code for Africa towards building digital democracy solutions that give people access to actionable information they need to make informed decisions.
Code for Africa (CfA) is the continent’s largest network of civic technology and data journalism labs, with teams in 21 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. CfA incubates initiatives as diverse as the africanDRONE network, the PesaCheck fact-checking initiative, the sensors.AFRICA air quality sensor network and the research and analysis programme CivicSignal.
CfA also manages the African Network of Centres for Investigative Reporting (ANCIR), which gives the continent’s best muckraking newsrooms the latest possible 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.
