Kyela District Council’s data road map: Harnessing local data for sustainable development
For several months, Data Zetu worked closely with Kyela District Council in designing the first sub-national data road map ever developed for a local government in Tanzania.
Many of the statistics that define our progress towards sustainable development originate at sub-national levels. In southwestern Tanzania, Kyela District Council has pioneered a sub-national data road map: a details, costed plan to improve quality and use of information to achieve sustainable development.
The data road map is expected to help the District Council improve comprehensiveness and quality of data it produces, enhance accessibility of data and use, and improve impact in delivering results. It may also help the District Council attract sub-national investment into improved data use; the road map’s budget includes a slew of activities that would cost less than $400,000 to transform the district’s use of data.
In this post, which is a sequel to the first one accessible here, we share the story of how Kyela District Council developed its first data road map, the results areas and targets the council is aspiring to achieve, and an invitation to collaborators to join in the efforts to improve local data for sustainable development in Kyela and other places.
Development of Kyela Data road map
The idea of a sub-national data road map emerged from experiences and insights of Data Zetu partners in the course of implement the initiative to facilitate better use of data in addressing community pain points in hyper-local settings in Tanzania. In a discussion with Kyela District Director at the time, the Director expressed interest in having a strategy that will help the council unlock challenges in data availability, accessibility and use. This provided an entry point for the Data Zetu and Kyela District Council Collaboration of which this data road map is an output.
The road map is a product of collaborative effort of many actors. Besides Data Zetu project partners, staff and management team for Kyela District, local leaders and executives in hyper local communities (wards and villages) and other actors at the regional and national level also provided inputs that enabled its design. The draft data road map was presented to local stakeholders at a district action planning meeting for Kyela leaders held in November 2018, and after another round of reviews, was discussed for adoption with Councilors and the Council Management Team for Kyela in January 2019.
What Kyela expects to achieve with the road map
Although the main challenge presents itself on the surface in terms of gaps in inaccessibility of data and poor quality of data, and gaps in use for decision making, discussions with stakeholders revealed underlying problems starting from data collection stage to data use.The data road map will therefore assist the council to address challenges limiting use of data for development by tackling the constraints throughout the data life cycle. The key focus areas of the data road map are:
- Improvement of quality and comprehensiveness of data collected and available at the district council level;
- Improvement in accessibility and flow of data on and at the hyper local community level; and,
- Enhancement of use and impact of data on and at the hyper local community level.
14 targets covering three dimensions of institutional data readiness will guide actors in implementation of the various proposed activities across the data value chain. These dimensions are [1]:
- People — the expertise/skills, receptivity, and commitment to using data;
- Process — the interactions among people and guidelines necessary to ensure that data are shared widely, and processes are in place to produce information that the institution can use; and,
- Data management (governance) — procedures and infrastructure for storing and retrieving information and how information that is critical to the institution becomes transparent with good management.
Putting the data road map into practice
There are two more steps for Kyela to kick-start the road map’s implementation. The first one is to mainstream the objectives, targets as well as proposed activities and indicators for data development in the Council’s Planning Documents (annual budget plans, medium term expenditure frameworks, and the council strategic plan). The second, is to mobilize partners and funding to enable collaboration in implementation of the data road map. The resource requirements for the data road map for Kyela are beyond what the council could raise on its own from local sources, and so it is crucial that other actors can join hands with the district council in implementing the various interventions that will unlock local data and facilitate inclusive development in the district. Interested stakeholders can get in touch with Kyela District Council Director as well as the dLab. The Tanzania Data Lab (dLab) after becoming a full fledged NGO will now be carrying forward some of the initiatives started by Data Zetu to develop local data for sustainable development.
Other opportunities to unlock local data
Data Zetu has prepared a methodology document to guide other local governments and actors, interested in developing their local data, in the development of data road maps. We have also prepared a budget template for other sub-national units to reference. Users are free to copy and distribute subject to acknowledgement and attribution to Data Zetu and its partners. Please access these resources here: http://bit.ly/kyeladataroadmap.
[1] https://www.ccsse.org/center/ssbtn/docs/Tools/Institutional_Data_Readiness_Assessment_Tool.pdf
