Kenya’s government is working on a Bill that seeks to make data held by the government accessible to the public. The freedom of information act will be implemented as part of Kenya’s new constitution voted in August 2010 and will be presented to parliament in the coming months. This was announced by Dr. Bitange Ndemo, the permanent secretary in Kenya’s Ministry of Information and Communication on Monday at the iHub at an event where he met more than 100 developers and ICT sector players. The PS asked stakeholders to be active in discussing the bill once it passed through the first reading and presented for discussion. Ndemo said that in the past, when bills were up for discussion, few people contributed only for the public to present good ideas once bills were finally passed as laws. At the same event, the PS revealed that he had undertaken a personal initiative to have data from various ministries available at http://opendata.go.ke.  “The best we can do for the country is to enable the country to make decisions based on scientific data,” said Ndemo. However, the developers were quick to point out that the portal had only seen a handful of content since its publication a few months ago. In response, the PS said that he was working with various ministries and were in processes of redacting more data which would be available in the coming months. He was quick to point out that developers often complained about accessibility of data without making any efforts to access the data, pointing out that he had been able to obtain data from several ministries.

However, developers led by Erik Herseman – co-founder of Ushahidi – and iHub had a different story, saying that they faced huge opposition when they approached relevant agencies for data.
Other developers advocated for a clause in the upcoming freedom of information Bill, dictating penalties on government employees that would deny access to data allowable under the law. They also called for measures that would go beyond ensuring that the data was not only available, but periodically up to date.

At the same event, it emerged that Google was working with the Nairobi City Council and would be making some data on Nairobi available in the future. Nokia also announced that it would be funding development and publicity of 3 applications based on open data. Nokia’s Head of Solutions, East and Southern Africa, Agatha Gikunda said that she would be receiving proposals in the next 2 weeks up to 18 of April and Nokia would pick the best three.

At the moment some Kenya datasets are available at the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics website, World Bank data set and Government of Kenya Open Data portal. More is available from the United Nations Data Set.