Part Two of a two-part series on data at the subnational level | By Christine Ajulu, Deputy Director – Open Institute Earlier this year, I wrote about why data so rarely moves at the county level. That first article sat with an uncomfortable set of obstacles: data that clashes with political agendas, county staff with…
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In Kiswahili, maono means vision. It is also the name of one of the projects closest to our heart at the Open Institute; a programme built around a simple belief: that community-based organisations are not at the bottom of the development pyramid, but the closest point in the system to the citizens it serves. Across…
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Across Africa, researchers are producing credible, rigorous, and often urgent findings. Governments are making decisions without them. This is not a research problem. It is a power problem, a communication problem, and an honest reckoning with who the evidence is actually made for. There is a version of this conversation that is easy and safe…
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Across many communities, data is constantly being collected about people’s needs, challenges, and lived realities. Yet, the very communities represented in this data are often excluded from understanding, managing, or using it meaningfully. Evidence Mkononi is a project led by Furaha, our Community Manager at Maono Space, under the Data Values Advocate Programme and a…
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Part One of a two-part series on data at the subnational level published by Christine Ajulu, Deputy Executive Director Imagine a nurse in a county health facility somewhere in Kenya. Call her Amina. Every month, she fills in a register on how many children have been immunised. She writes the figures neatly, signs the form,…
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If you were to count every hour spent preparing meals, cleaning homes, tending to children, or caring for the elderly, how much of the economy would that be worth? For decades, the daily rhythm of unpaid work, mostly done by women, was invisible in national statistics. Time-use surveys started as simple diaries of how people…
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In 2019, Kenya launched the first Kenya Strategy for the Development of Statistics (KSDS I) – our first attempt to organise how the nation produces, manages, and uses official statistics. It promised four things: a stronger national data system, better quality, smarter investments in people and technology, and wider use of data by citizens. Six…
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The Devolution Conference 2025 convened in Homa Bay marked a key milestone in Kenya’s political and development calendar. It was a moment to reflect on over 12 years of county-level transparency since the 2013 Constitution. For us at Open Institute, it marked more than a decade of collaborating with counties to build open, responsive institutions…
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By Florence Syevuo and Al Kags At a recent breakfast gathering in Nairobi, we asked each person who walked into the room to take a single puzzle piece. No explanation. No picture of the final image. Just that small fragment, handed over with a quiet challenge. As the morning unfolded, something wonderful happened. Strangers began…
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We propose ten principles for guiding the reimagination of digital and data infrastructure. The funding freezes and project shutdowns we are now witnessing across Africa’s public digital infrastructure are not just unfortunate side effects of shifting geopolitics. They are symptoms of a system designed with fundamental weaknesses. And those weaknesses have long been known: dependency…
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📅 Dates: November 25 & 26, 2024
📍 Location: Nairobi, kenya
Unlock the future of data governance with industry leaders, insightful sessions, and networking opportunities!
