Wednesday, 4 September 2013

Open Health datasets on the web for Kenya


One of the most frustrating things when working with data sets in health and education, or perhaps all, data sets is finding the right data set in the format and year(!) that you need it in.

Here's an exhaustive list of the open data sets that we were able to find of the open data sets for health in Kenya that fit the definition of open data i.e.
Open data is data that can be freely used, reused and redistributed by anyone - subject only, at most, to the requirement to attribute and sharealike.
Ministry of Health, Government of Kenya
List of health facilities in Kenya
Health Sector Services Fund disbursements.


Kenya Open Data Initiative
From:  Various Ministries in the Government of Kenya.
Various assorted health databases
Also contains some external databases contributed by non-governmental sources


Medical Board, Kenya
From: Kenyan Medical Practitioners and Dentists Board
Retention Register : List of licensed health practitioners and health facilities




(While other databases exist, these require passwords and typically are for credentialed members  e.g. www.hiskenya.org so these were not included).

Thanks to Madi-Jimba Yahya @madijimba and Crystal Simeoni @crystalsimeoni

Annus horribilis for Kenyan School Children?

I wonder at the reasoning behind the decision by the Ministry of Education to schedule an annual event for headteachers to coincide with the opening of schools.

Not impressed
This is in a context where children in public schools routinely lose about 53% of their learning time from teacher absenteeism, both sanctioned and unsanctioned. In addition, to these 'normal' time leakages, school children in our public schools lost at least 24 teaching days this year from the teachers strike that had stopped all learning earlier this year.

This infographic on teacher absenteeism puts the situation in perspective. Makes me want to ask:
"Ministry of Education, what were you thinking?"