cMapIT — Building a Startup Powered by Open Data in Nigeria
Nigeria’s tech scene has been thriving in recent years. From 2012 to 2016, the ICT sector has grown from 6% to 11% of GDP, and was the single fastest growing sector of the economy. The country is Africa’s most populous, and this year it has also overtaken South Africa to become the continent’s largest economy as well. Half the country, or 90 million people, have internet access, an increase from about 1 in 20 citizens a decade ago. This huge new market has created a wealth of opportunities for tech startups. Lagos, the largest city, displays all the common markers of a tech boom: a suburb dubbed “Silicon Lagoon”, globally acclaimed incubators such as the Co-Creation Hub, angel investor networks, and visits from the likes of Mark Zuckerberg.
Open data practitioners in the global south often work within civil society or government on issues such as transparency and accountability. Similarly, Nigeria has a federal open data initiative that was started by its government in 2014, and it is also part of international initiatives such as the Open Government Partnership and the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative.
Beyond these initiatives, we were curious to see how the country’s tech entrepreneurs were taking on open data, given the enormous economic value that it has the potential to unlock. So we got in touch with Abiri Oluwatosin Niyi, co-founder and lead at cMapIT and GISforSI, to learn how he is using a combination of community building, online training, crowdsourcing, and developing online GIS (Geographic Information Systems) platforms to build a business around open GIS data in Nigeria. Niyi shared with us a mix of frustrations, cautious optimism and a very inspiring Do-It-Yourself mentality.
Yan: I’d like to start off by asking you about what kinds of data you guys work with, and a brief overview of what cMapIT does.
Niyi: I was initially working with an implementation agency for a World Bank project based in Lagos that was building transportation infrastructure. I would have to go on field trips and write reports that featured a lot of maps and data visualisations. That was when I first realised the importance of location intelligence and how it is applicable to a lot of professions. At the same time, I saw that the processes involved in capturing the data, converting it to different formats, to the point of visualisation, is really expensive. It was around 2007, and back then ArcGIS (an online mapping tool) was $12,000, which is a lot of money.
So, when I left that place and joined academia — I was a teaching assistant at a university for a couple of years — I saw that academics used GIS and location intelligence too, but I realised the academics also could not afford it. In that process I formed a team with a technical co-founder and we came up with a tool that allowed people to capture datasets using their mobile phones. For instance, if you are an academic working on a project and you have a few hundred students, they all have mobiles phones, so why can’t you convert these devices into tools?
We built a simple mobile and web application that allows them to capture as much information as they want, and then it goes to a central repository. It got a lot of traction as an open source project, and a lot of interest. We then decided to incorporate a company around it and called it cMapIT.
The core product of cMapIT is a mapping platform. When academics, or individuals or local governments approach us, we create a mapping platform for them within 24 hours.
Yan: When was cMapIT launched? And how does it relate to your other organisation, GISforSI?
Niyi: January 2015 was when cMapIT was launched officially as a company. After a few months, almost a year after we launched, we noticed that the traction we got for cMapIT was a bit slow, because people never really understood location intelligence. We needed to teach people about GIS and location intelligence, and at the same time, we needed to build a community around cMapIT. In the process, we thought, if we created an online school that teaches GIS as a skill, then indirectly we will get a community forming around cMapIT. So that’s why we launched GISforSI as a free online GIS school. GISforSI means GIS for Social Impact.
We designed a curriculum around four tools. The first tool is cMapIT, the second is Carto, the third is QGIS and the fourth is ArcGIS. We launched GISforSI as a way to expand our community by teaching people GIS skills: teaching them how to capture data, how to store data, how to manage the database and how to visualise the data. So GISforSI is like a sister company to cMapIT. While cMapIT is a company that has to do with creating an innovative tool, GISforSI is for expanding literacy around GIS use in NIgeria. GISforSI has been able to foster a community of a thousand active users to cMapIT. These users collect and share data, and advise us. Over 90% of the community are from Nigeria, and we have a few from Kenya.
Yan: You said there was a lot of data collection that has been enabled by cMapIT as a tool. What other kinds of data is usually overlaid or used in conjunction with the data that is collected through cMapIT?
Niyi: We have another site called Localdata.ng that we created too. It’s more of an introductory platform to penetrate the Nigerian academic sector. When showing our tools to professors, we needed to create a tool that they could play around with and access hundreds and hundreds of datasets. Localdata.ng is a content aggregator that combines primary data from us with secondary data. Our primary data from cMapIT is less than 5% of the data on Localdata.ng, and the rest of the secondary data from elsewhere.
We needed a way to retain the community that we have built, and for them to have data on the platform ready to use. So what we do is go around and access data from the government. We surf the internet, go to offices, get access to data from OSM (Open Street Maps) via plugins, and then we put everything together and drag everything down to Localdata.ng for easy access.
Yan: It sounds to me like there is quite a lot of data available publicly in Nigeria. That leads me to my next question. In terms of the limits and controls that the government puts on the availability of data, is it quite difficult to get data from government sources in Nigeria or are they willing to share their data with the public?
Niyi: The honest thing about that is, one, our government doesn’t really understand the value of data. The second part is that a lot of NGOs and international organisations that come into Nigeria, they get a lot of data that the government is not even aware of. A lot of international organisations cart away a lot of datasets. The third problem is that the government doesn’t know how to capture data. Most of the time they work with consultants. The government probably uses 10% of what the consultant finds and probably won’t care about the other 90%. That’s the problem we have. We have a government that doesn’t understand and doesn’t value the use of data.
So, when researchers or other people need datasets, they have to approach international organisations, and you understand the privileges you need to have, because most organisations don’t even make their datasets open. A lot of data on the National Bureau of Statistics’ website is from consultants and other organisations that they work with through donor funding, and technically this data does not even belong to the Nigerian government.
As for the data that is available, the bulk of it is in PDF, and when you approach the officials in charge of it for the Excel version, they say they can’t release it or they don’t have it anymore because they were careless and didn’t store it properly.
Yan: As you know, in a lot of open data communities, there are various players that play niche roles from civic hackers who build tools with data, to government departments that run data portals, to journalists who communicate to the public using data. What kind of collaborations have you guys done to amplify the data community in Nigeria?
Niyi: To be very realistic, there’s one thing that’s quite interesting about Nigerian tech space. There’s a lot of competition, and that leads to fragmentation. You see a lot of engagements around data, or building startups, but it’s more of a competition than a collaboration.
For the bigger local players in the tech space, who are very good at proposal writing, are official registered civil society organisations, and have linkages with funders, it’s easy to raise funds if they can come up with a good product. So, a lot of people in that space who understand and have good links in the funding pathways, they never cooperate. It’s either they want to own your technology or they don’t work with you. So, the civic tech space in Nigeria is experiencing a lot of unhealthy competition.
Yan: What kinds of business models does cMapIT operate under? And also, how has cMapIT been funded so far?
Niyi: We have a passionate investor who funded us in the early stages but we haven’t gotten a series of investments. Our business model is to build an entire mapping platform for clients and charge them a fee of $400 to $600 for it. So if a university wants to have their own mapping platform, we replicate our platform for them. We currently have a handful of clients but we haven’t broken even yet. I’m giving it about five years.
We bootstrap a lot, and save a lot of money to put back into the business and data gathering. I would sometimes get volunteers to help me with mapping when they go back to their hometowns and in exchange I would cover their transportation costs.
My own dream, which is what I’m sure will happen, is that there is going to be a trading system around data, where data becomes a commodity. When you have a mobile mapping platform like we do, anyone who uses it can collect data as an investment. We want to create a community of individuals who have ownership of the data that they have collected. For example, some people who have collected and own datasets on waste management, others who collect and own data about livestock. When that kind of community emerges, for example, if the World Bank wants to start a project, instead of investing so much money on a feasibility study, they can look for the communities of data owners, and buy data off of them. I’m seeing the possibility of a trading system like that for data.
For more on cMapIT, follow them on Twitter @cMapIT.
Open & Shut is a project from the Small Media team. Small Media is an organisation working to support freedom of information in closed societies, and developed the Iran Open Data portal.
Cover image by skp, story edited by Tom Ormson.
