alertME: keeping an eye on your backyard
Access to documents and information that make it easy for communities to understand what’s happening in their neighbourhood is crucial if they are to be prepared for the effects of proposed developments.
As a result of not having access to crucial information related to a mining project near her home, for example, 73-year-old Esther Sibanyoni and her husband now live from hand to mouth while battling to pay water and lights bills on their old-age pension. Esther’s family was moved from their rural home in Nkomeni to a suburban neighbourhood in Kriel, Mpumalanga, to make way for mining.
Sibanyoni said she had lived in her rural home in Nkomeni for a long time, and it was only when the mining activities started that her family and community started getting sick. She herself was recently diagnosed with asthma.
Her community agreed to be relocated to suburbia after cracks started appearing in the walls of their mud homes, caused by mine blasting. Sibanyoni had no recollection of any documents shared by the mine before or after mining commenced.
Her community is now trying to find ways to adjust from years of living sustainable and simple rural livelihoods in Nkomeni to the fast-paced lifestyle of suburbia, which requires not only social but financial adjustments as well.
In terms of government regulations, communities such as hers should be informed about and have a say in environmental authorisations, social and labour plans, and water use licences for development and mining projects. In many instances, such as Esther’s, this simply does not happen.
Our alertME project aims to address the challenges created by this lack of access to information by making development documents and data freely accessible to interested and affected parties.
alertME
alertME built on a pilot project in Ghana, ‘Where My Money Dey?’, designed to improve public accountability and civic engagement through active citizenry. Oxpeckers Investigative Environmental Journalism drew on insights from the actNOW function to develop a #GreenAlert prototype at Code for Africa’s EditorsLab hackathon in September 2013, winning the funding to scale this up into the first version of #GreenAlert, built by the tech team at Code for Kenya on behalf of Oxpeckers.
#GreenAlert inspired #MineAlert, a centralised platform for users to access, track and share information and documents on mining applications and licences. This iteration was developed by ScienceLink in South Africa.
Open Data Durban joined Oxpeckers to strengthen #GreenAlert in South Africa, by improving the original actNOW mobilisation tools in the platform, and to help local government agencies adopt the platform as a major civic engagement tool.
#GreenAlert & #MineAlert
The #GreenAlert and #MineAlert tools ensure that users are kept in the loop about developments happening in their neighbourhood, by subscribing to alerts on developments requiring mining and environmental authorisations.
Both tools are citizen-focused web-based apps that aim to promote transparency and informed citizenry. Using location-based alerts for development applications, they provide access to important documents such as water use licences, environmental authorisations and mining social & labour plans.
Affected communities can use them to share information and engage with public review processes. Source documents are shared via the alertME online cloud repository at sourceAfrica.net, and are investigated by journalists who report on related issues for Oxpeckers Investigative Environmental Journalism and other media outlets.
The AlertME projects are open source platforms and the code is available on Code4Africa’s Github repository, enabling other organisations to adapt it to suit any country. Currently, there is a #GreenAlert project being initiated for Kenya.
The devil in the data
Oxpeckers has spent the past two years sourcing data and documents through applications via the Public Access to Information Act (PAIA), as well as from a range of stakeholders and users via crowdsourcing.
These PAIA processes have resulted in ground-breaking investigative journalism, and the liberation of a huge, never-before-seen data set on the financial provisions for the rehabilitation of defunct mines (R60-billion held for mines that are never closed).
Government and corporate agencies are often reluctant to make their data and documents public, despite the regulations that stipulate they should do so. The most direct way of sharing this data would be to include an API that links to existing databases and that would allow for the application data feed to be real time.
Another challenge arises out of limited community budgets and high data costs. Sharing and crowd-sourcing data are difficult for poor communities, as discussed in our “Digital Apartheid” article that featured in The Huffington Post SA.
We pledge to “leave no one behind”- SDGs
The alertME suite is an integral part of domesticating the implementation of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which aim to end poverty, protect the planet and ensure prosperity for all. We are focused on these goals:
Goal 3 — Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being
Goal 6 — Clean water and sanitation
Goal 7 — Affordable and clean energy
Goal 11 — Sustainable, safe resilient cities and communities
Goal 12 — Sustainable consumption and production
Goal 13 — Climate action
Goal 14 — Life below water
Goal 15 — Life on land
In July 2016, we had the opportunity to attend Open Camps at the UN’s headquarters in New York, where we presented #GreenAlert — Tracking Environmental Impact Assessments in South Africa at the Unite for Humanity Camp, which had a specific focus on using technology to implement the SDGs. We were asked to showcase a project in which open source technology and open data can be used to achieve the SDGs.
In South Africa alertME has generated great interest at events such as the Mining and Environmental Justice Indaba, the Public Interest Law Gathering, the Alternative Mining Indaba and the AWARD CSO Indabas. Training sessions with affected community members and other stakeholders are giving us valuable feedback on ways to improve the platforms.
#MineAlert gained a lot of interest from the general public, with several requests for access to the spatial data sets driving the platform. For example, an investment group involved in coal and chrome mining asked to use the database “for purposes of identifying entities with mining interest, in need of developmental partners”.
Local and international environmental NGOs requested the spatial data sets so they could use them to compare “existing and future mining and development trends in order to target biodiversity conservation projects effectively”. University research units and students also asked to use the data sets.
What’s to come
Civic society partnerships are helping us to embed #MineAlert with various external platforms. Bench Marks Foundation, an NGO that focuses on corporate social responsibility, is linking up ActionVoices to allow users to share ground level reports/videos from the field. #MineAlert users can also launch campaigns on awethu.mobi as part of their ActNow campaign.
Oxpeckers has also been receiving invaluable input from the Centre for Applied Legal Studies, Centre for Environmental Rights, Access To Information Network, SAHA, AWARD and Mining Affected Communities. In February 2017, Oxpeckers presented #MineAlert at the annual Alternative Mining Indaba in Cape Town. As part of the planned 2017 roadshows, #MineAlert was also presented and demonstrated live at the recent AWARD CSO Indaba in Burgersfort, Limpopo.
We are in discussions with the Department of Environmental Affairs about options for accessing environmental authorisations, and are engaging with the International Association of Impact Assessments in South Africa (IAIAsa) to bring their networks of environmental consultants on board.
alertME is pioneered by the Oxpeckers Centre for Investigative Environmental Journalism and Open Data Durban, with support from Code for Africa, the Open Society Foundation for South Africa and ScienceLink.
