The Open Institute in conjunction with the PEPFAR-MCC Partnership is organising a session at the Africa Open Data Conference that shall be held in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania from 2nd to 5th September 2015. The three-hour session shall be held on the 5th at the Julius Nyerere Conference Centre from 9:45am.
The event is designed to facilitate better knowledge sharing of how Open Data can be and is being used to strengthen subnational transparency and accountability and how citizens are more involved at the local level in the development of or within their areas.
The goal is to focus on sub-national open data efforts, challenges and opportunities with the aim to tie these to achieving SDG’s with an emphasis that data should be considered an essential resource that we will need to marshal from public, private, and citizen-generated sources to achieve the SDGs.
The event shall feature a panel of great minds who have a lot of experience in the devolution area. These experts include:
- Prof. Bitange Ndemo, the visionary behind Kenya’s tremendous progress in the ICT arena;
- Mr. Chris Finch of the World Bank, who is currently one of the leaders of the bank’s work in Devolution in Kenya;
- Mr. Toju Onaiwu, the Director of the Open Data Initiative in Edo State, Nigeria
- Jessica Musila, the Executive Director of Mzalendo who has a lot of experience
- Davis Adieno, who leads the subnational programmes at Development Initiatives
We are excited also to know that “the Tweeting Chief” Kariuki shall also be at the event to share his experience in citizen engagement at local level as well as Zacharia Chiliswa from Jesuit Hakimani. The session will be moderated by Irungu Houghton, the Associate Director, Society for International Development who is passionate about building open, active and accountable governance systems and communities.
The outcomes from the ideation session in the conference shall be used during a Community Data Event later in September that will bring together policy makers, data scientists, and web developers. The Goal of the Community Data Event in Washington DC, will be to kickstart new ways to source, analyze, and share data for sustainable development. This event will be a pilot, which if a success will provide the basis for replicable events an on ongoing basis during the 15 year lifespan of the goals.
The Community Data Event is organised by members of the Global Partnership on Sustainable Development Data and other stakeholders, in advance of the UN Summit on September 26th where heads of state will adopt the Sustainable Development Goals, a set of 17 goals for the world.
