Our Executive Director, Al Kags, was featured on the Ole Law Podcast where the issues of active citizenship and responsive governments - our main mandate as an organisation - were discussed.
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Open government is an inclusive and participatory approach to governance that allows citizens to be involved in the formulation and eventual implementation of public policies, and has been recognized as a catalyst for democracy and inclusivity in sustainable growth. Government is open when it follows the principles of transparency, accountability and participation; key initiatives include open data, public participation, open contracting, open parliament, among others.
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Eight years after it gained popularity in Kenya, WhatsApp is now not only owned by Facebook but has more features added to it making it more appealing for masses and increasing its penetration in most countries worldwide. With the new ownership came new terms and conditions in 2012 which most users agreed to without reading. A new set of terms and conditions were unveiled by the company early this year which caused quite a stir online. Data protection experts, governments and civil societies went up in arms with the new terms and the extent in which individual and business data is collected from the platform. At the Open Institute, we convened an informal lunch time chat to discuss the new terms and conditions and to try and explain what the impact of them would be to the everyday citizen.
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Written by ‘Gbenga Sesan This is a guest blog written by the Executive Director of Paradigm Initiative, a key #RestoreDataRights partner from the Nigerian region, emphasising the importance of data governance issues in Africa as outlined in the Restore Data Rights declaration which calls for responsible data use on the continent. On January 1, 2020,…
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The Open Institute on the 6th of March convened virtual webinars across various African countries to commemorate the global celebration of the Open Data Day. This year’s event was themed “Data for Equal Development”, and discussions centred around the need to promote the conversation on data governance in the COVID-19 context, a topic that inspired the #RestoreDataRights movement that seeks to promote transparent, accountable and inclusive data governance in Africa.
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We had a virtual sit down with Dr Amy Lehman, founder of the Lake Tanganyika Floating Health Clinic, an international organisation whose mission is to address healthcare access and education for isolated communities in the Lake Tanganyika Basin/Great Lakes region in Central Africa.
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The Open Institute has today taken a raft of measures to reduce our team’s exposure to COVID-19. Starting today and for the next 30 days, we shall not participate in any physical meetings or activities. We are also implementing a “no travel” policy starting tomorrow for the next 30 days, when the policy will be…
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When the COVID-19 pandemic hit our continent, it became apparent that some gaps, particularly the shortage of healthcare workers, existed across different African countries. The Africa CDC PACT Project, a brainchild of the health committee at the African Union (AU), sought to ensure that Africa was not left behind in matters of health. The project…
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In this blog, Mukanda shares her personal experience with working from home. From time to time, we feature posts by different team members and encourage them to give their personal thoughts and opinions on various topics of interest to the organisation. My alarm clock went off at 4.30 a.m, I woke up ready to conquer…
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We have closed our office and empowered our team to work efficiently from home. Happy new year! We are so excited to be back and to have made it to 2021. As you have seen from our previous blogs, we have been examining ourselves and talking about how we are changing ourselves as an organisation…
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