Partner collaboration key for open data training
After training teams of journalists in Nigeria on using open data, we reflect on the importance of shared responsibility.
By Nkechi Coker and Andie Okon
Data has become a relevant resource to generate evidence to hold government accountable and highlight areas for improvement.
In Nigeria, Code for Africa (CfA) has been working with newsrooms and independent journalists to help build their capacity to find and disseminate data.
After interactions with our vibrant communities in Lagos, Abuja and Benin City, we saw that journalists and civil society organisations have limited knowledge of data sitting in free data portals such as the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS); development organisations like the World Bank and the UN Data; and publicly curated data platforms such as openAFRICA, gazeti.AFRICA and sourceAFRICA. Even where journalists were aware, it was difficult to navigate, utilise, interpret, and perform the required analysis that would result in new findings.
We partnered with NBS to train our 1400+ member community and newsroom partners to learn how to use official statistics for data-driven journalism. A partnership with Nigeria’s largest repository of country data and statistics offered us the opportunity to use data to train journalists and other infomediaries.
The preliminary success led to a partnership between Code for Africa, NBS and the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN), which was recognised with an award from the Brown Institute/UN-DESA collaboration contest in 2018.
This partnership helped us bridge the communication gap between journalists and statistics offices, which has led to a shared goal of disseminating accurate information to citizens and creating a substantive newswire of data-driven analytical news — a core goal of CfA.
Measuring Impact
Open Data for Governments training: CfA trained 35 NBS staff on the principles of open data, and how their supply of data can be improved by introducing specific standards to meet the demand for truly open and accessible datasets. We also explored various tools that may help improve citizen engagement with their platforms.
After the training Kayode M. Olaniyan, the technical assistant to the Statistician General, said: “We will embrace every technology to open up our data to the public. We appreciate Code For Africa for this initiative and now better understand the relevance of open data. For us, this is a major achievement.”
Launch of HURUmap Nigeria: As part of our open data goals, CfA worked with NBS to deploy a data insight tool HURUmap, a tool that allows interaction with regional data. This platform gives journalists access to investigate NBS data in already visualised form, enabling them to embed it to a website or download the raw data. You can also map the data, tabularise it and compare one item with another.
Explore HURUmap here.
Development of new courseware: Together with NBS, we have developed courseware on using official statistics for storytelling, which aims to tackle the misrepresentation of NBS data in media and storytelling. It also includes practical applications such as the process of understanding statistical reports and visualization tools.
Together with NBS’s technical experts, we trained more than 160 journalists in three newsrooms — News Agency of Nigeria, Daily Trust, International Centre for Investigative Reporting — as well as our Hacks/Hackers community in three cities — Lagos, Benin and Abuja. A participant wrote that the inclusion of data in news reports was necessary for better understanding.
Speaking at the training workshop in Abuja, data analyst and trainer from the NBS, Lucky Ogidan, said the aim of the training was to optimise the NBS portal to tell data stories because people need to understand how to use the data before applying it in their stories. “We serve the government, the economy and the public with data. Journalists need to use more data and statistics in telling their stories, because it can be used to identify societal problems that need attention in the country.”
Code for Africa (CfA) is the continent’s largest federation of indigenous civic technology and open data laboratories with CfA labs in Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania and Uganda and a further five affiliate labs in Cameroon, Ethiopia, Ghana, Morocco and Sierra Leone and funded projects in a further 12 countries. CfA manages the $1m/year innovateAFRICA.fund and $500,000/year impactAFRICA.fund, as well as key digital democracy resources such as the openAFRICA.net data portal and the GotToVote.cc election toolkit. CfA primarily supports grassroots citizen organisations and the media to help liberate data and empower citizens, but also works with progressive government agencies to improve digital service delivery.
In addition to funding and technology support, CfA’s labs incubate a series of trendsetting initiatives including the PesaCheck fact-checking initiative in East Africa, the continental africanDRONE network, and the African Network of Centres for Investigative Reporting (ANCIR) that spearheaded Panama Papers probes across the continent. CfA is an initiative of the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ).
