The President of Kenya, His Excellency Mwai Kibaki today officially launched the Government Open Data Portal at the Kenya International Conference Centre (KICC) Nairobi. The portal will, for the first time, make government data from ministries and government agencies available to the general public in an easy to search and view format.
Kenya becomes the first country in Sub-Sahara in African to release government information to the general public. The portal is intended to enable citizens to search and display national and county level data in graphs and maps, and allow for easy comparison and analysis between the data. This portal becomes the first and largest government data portal in sub–Saharan Africa.
While launching the portal President Mwai Kibaki commended the Ministry of Information and Communication and the Kenya ICT Board on achieving this milestone: “Kenya needs to achieve a high level of openness, accountability, ethics and trust. By keeping the public up to date with information, the government will achieve these objectives. Information is power – an informed citizenry is an empowered citizenry,” he said.

The President voiced his concern on the slow uptake of the fibre connectivity due to high costs of access. He directed the Ministry of Information and Communication to consult with other stakeholders and come up with strategies that will ensure all Kenyans enjoy the benefit of faster and efficient internet connectivity, especially now that citizens will want to access large volumes of government data.

Open data portal provides information on six main categories  - Education, Energy, Health, Population, Poverty and Water and Sanitation. The portal becomes another major milestone to the country especially after dominating the mobile money transfer space with innovative applications and other mobile innovations.

Many sectors are expected to benefit from the availability of government data. Developers for example, are expected to harvest this information and come up with innovative applications that will disseminate the data through different devises including mobile phones. Citizens will then be able to benefit from the information they receive. Some organisations have already developed applications to mine the government data and have come up with applications like Huduma from Ushahidi, Msema Kweli from iHub Nairobi, Livestock Index Insurance application from ILRI and EatOutKenya among others.

The Open Data Portal initiative was spearheaded by the Ministry of Information and Communication, managed by the Kenya ICT Board in partnership with the World Bank, Socrata and private web and content developers.

The Government recognizes the power of information and it will continue to facilitate free flow of access to information as a critical requirement for the creation of an open society. It will enact necessary legislation in line with the constitution to ensure continued public access to government information.

The data will be available on https://opendata.go.ke.