Data as political: Offline to Online exclusions

Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral...technology’s interaction with the social ecology is such that technical developments frequently have environmental, social, and human consequences that go far beyond the immediate purposes of the technical devices and practices themselves. ~ Melvin Kranzberg

Following the discussions around open data, the issue of what data inclusions constitute privacy violations, especially when it comes to big data, is perhaps the biggest concern to open data advocates. To quote Kieron O’Hara, what we seek is “transparent Government and not transparent citizens”.  While the issue of data that should not be included has been getting a lot of attention, the issue of data exclusions that should be included has however been getting less attention. 

At the recently concluded Hivos’ Service Delivery Indicators Project Data for Education and Health meetings, attendees were quite vocal about the political nature of data, and warned that to treat it as a neutral thing, is to implicitly support the biases built into the data.  Where the data is being used for policy making, especially resource allocation (!), then it becomes even more important to pay attention to the motives, blind spots, capacities and indeed, values of the persons designing the data collection exercise, and the collecting and analyzing of this data. It’s not a stretch to say that marginalization and exclusions offline tend to be mirrored during the data collection process as can be seen in e.g. Kenya where data from North Eastern Kenya is often left out, with  “inaccessibility, security, expense, capacity” often given as the reasons for the non-collection of this data. As a result, where the counties wish to use data for policy, they find themselves having to use proxy data, or else carry out primary research with their limited resources to correct this gap. 

These data gaps matter.  When opening up the Kenya Open Data portal, President Mwai Kibaki said “The Government data website will be particularly useful to policy makers and business persons who require timely and accurate information in formulating policies and making business decisions.” Where there is no data, then policy is deduced from ‘experience’ and extrapolation, which does a disservice to these areas as all too often this information, is neither timely nor accurate. It’s become common, with perhaps the exception of the Central Government, to have data blank spots over some counties, especially those from North Eastern Kenya. 

In addition to data collected by state and non state actors, this also extends to crowd sourcing platforms developed to collect information from citizens via citizen reports. A cursory look at the platforms deployed for election, water, infrastructure monitoring etc. have most of the reports from citizens clustered around the major cities and towns, and as an interesting peculiarity of Kenyan data, areas that are not arid or semi-arid. It’s interesting how one can almost get a perfect match between rainfall patterns and socio-economic wellbeing in Kenya with the arid and semi arid lands tending to do more poorly than their greener counterparts. 

Other pertinent exclusions include data on Persons with Disabilities, with the attendant policy implications. Where data is not collected on say, accessible health and education infrastructure, then this could negatively impact educational and health outcomes of PWDs. To illustrate, if the data suggests that there are 20 facilities available to citizens in a certain county, if  all 20 facilities  are inaccessible to PWDs, then this number should read “0”. Where this data is not available, then the assumption is that the PWDs in the county are being served, while in truth they aren’t and this invisibility of the persons is reflected in subsequent policy actions and resources allocation. 

It is perhaps not overstating to suggest that these exclusions are seen where real world exclusions apply e.g. People living in informal urban settlements tend to be missing from the urban planning process, except as a problem that needs to be resolved. This was flagged by the mappers of Map Kibera who wanted to give visibility (existence?) to the people who live, work, worship etc. in Kibera, and was never visible in any Government maps. Kibera was a blank spot on the Nairobi map until young Kiberans created the first free and open digital map of their own community.

For policy makers, open data proponents and civil society, the implications for this are obvious. We need, when carrying out projects to examine what real world exclusions exist, map these, and see if they’re mirrored in the data that we’d like to use for policy. Only then can we say we’ve made a good faith effort in promoting ethical and equitable data use for policy.

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?"

Quick hits: Social Innovation Tracker

Takachar
Unmanaged waste and severe fuel shortage are two significant issues facing Nairobi dwellers.  Takacharhas a business-in-a-box model that allows the waste-pickers to own and operate low-cost technologies to turn unused organic waste into charcoal. They do this by firstly carrying out waste collection by mobilizing the entire slum to turn in their waste (and not just the few who can afford the service). Second, they turn organic waste into a safe and affordable cooking fuel for local households. They hope that this will lead to less charcoal production from wood and save trees, while serving wide-ranging social issues such as increasing local income, reducing greenhouse emissions. 

Ping (Positive Innovation for the Next Generation)

Using smartphones to respond to, track and prevent malaria epidemics.

Healthcare workers in Botswana, equipped with smartphones can now gather malaria information via an app and upload the data (along with pictures, video, and audio) to the cloud. This enables Health Ministry officials in Botswana to:

• Promptly collect and analyze context-aware data on malarial outbreaks
•  Track developments in real time and using GPS coordinates
•  Rapidly help to suppress the spread of malaria
•  Quickly dispatch medicines and mosquito nets
•  Monitor treatments and accumulate lifesaving research data.

Good Intentions…

The story of Kibera’s “wheelbarrow ambulances”, where wheelbarrows retrofitted with a siren are used to ferry people to hospital was broadcast by Citizen TV at the beginning of the year.
First, to be very clear, this is an innovation born of necessity. Queen Wambua, the Traditional Birth Attendant who thought up the idea explains in the clip above, that she needed a way to ferry women who were bleeding-out during childbirth to Mbagathi Hospital. This is an invention that arose out of our informal settlements where a deplorable lack of basic infrastructure, state neglect and a sheer disregard for citizens created conditions extremely hostile to basic rights to health and other social services.  To reiterate, they needed wheelbarrow ambulances because people were dying in Kibera before they could get to hospital. Amref, the organization supporting the initiative, decided to do so because the only viable way of getting people out of Kibera’s non-roads and narrow alleyways was a wheelbarrow. These facts are undisputable.

This story however left me extremely ambivalent. I recognize the pragmatism and the life saving possibilities of the wheelbarrow ambulance. But! When we benchmark this innovation against prevailing acceptable minimum standards for healthcare including privacy, dignity and safety, it is unlikely that these are being met by the wheelbarrow ambulance. Looked at through this normative lens (“Is it right? Is it acceptable”) this invention misses the mark by a mile.

These are not pot-shots at people who are trying to make a difference. Not at all. I’m also not saying that the wheelbarrow ambulances should not exist, because the alternative, as Queen Wambua said, is probable death for some of the residents. This is a different argument. My ambivalence comes in when I wonder if by accepting this level of service; we set a standard for what ‘acceptable’ healthcare service in informal settlements is. By failing to insist that we tackle the systemic pathologies e.g. lack of security, infrastructure and health services, we deal with the symptomatic, and leave the underlying causes festering. That people can pinpoint with GPS-like accuracy where the security black-spots are but this knowledge, this certainty does not translate to the deployment of extra police to those black-spots is symptomatic of a moribund security system.  That there are 200,000 people who have no access to adequate health care system in the capital city, tells a tale of what the health system actually looks like on a national level. These injustices are unaddressed, and they need to be looked at soberly and with the seriousness that the residents of Kibera deserve. For me who works in development, it also raises questions about what exactly the over 1,000 NGOs in Kibera, many of them working on health actually do. (NGO registry and rating board coming right up!)

There are obviously many basics e.g. roads, security, and healthcare that obviously need to be put in place. And for this, every past state official charged with the oversight of any part of Kibera has utterly and completely failed to do his or her job.

The situation also calls for new solutions that would help solve, or at the very least ameliorate the situation of Kibera residents. There needs to be ways in which we are thinking of improved ways in which we can deliver basic healthcare in extremely resource constrained environments. There are groups that have been innovating, and getting traction on ways in which to provide cheap healthcare to ‘BOP’ e.g LifeSpring maternity hospitals in India where the average costs of labor/ delivery is about $70.

We need to be thinking of innovations that can change how we deliver accessible and affordable healthcare in Kenya, as the current system for public health is not working. We should develop ways in which we can get more people into affordable health care schemes because right now, the costs of medical care are the number one impoverishing factor for families.

This service innovation needs to happen as a matter of urgency.  And in the meantime, the wheelbarrow ambulance will continue saving lives.

Social Innovation in Resource Scarce Markets

Hivos and Kennisland in March, 2013 organized Lab2 that brought together social innovators from the Americas, Europe, Asia, Africa and Oceania.  Together, we grappled with what is perhaps *the* question encapsulated in the lab summary:

Social innovation labs are the latest vehicles for systemic change – for disrupting the way our cities, our schools, our welfare programs, even our economic systems run. But what is in the black box called ‘the lab’? How do they really work?

In a very simplified description of how social change happens, we think projects might be successfully implemented if certain inputs are provided to carry out a project ( typically human resources, awareness, and project specific input like a well, or a technology platform, improved method etc. ), something happens when society interacts with these inputs, and at the end of it all, social change is hopefully observed.

There however still remains much of which is unknown. Like, what it is that occurs to produce this social change? Labs2 was an exploration of this mysterious alchemy. In addition to figuring out this magic middle potion, other questions arose e.g. innovators, especially those from the Global South, often have to juggle multiple roles.  When speaking to innovators in Africa, a common refrain is that they have to do it all. In addition to being the innovators, they also have to be the ones who scale the innovation, as well as at times help in creating the infrastructure needed to support the scaling and uptake of their innovation.

At the recently concluded World Summit on the Information Society Forum 2013, an interesting high panel discussion was held to talk about innovation.  The ICT Innovations and Standards dialogue looked at innovation from the perspective of emerging economies and barriers and enablers of this.

Innovation, a panelist pointed out, was the result of an education system, funding for sustained R&D, funding for adoption of this technology etc.   They also discussed innovation as basically a two step procedure with conceptualization as the first step and commercialization as the second.  The latter, which entails the scaling and replication of the ideas developed during conceptualization is a very resource intensive process, and there  are lessons to be learned from countries like India, that’s exploring the idea of frugal innovation, which is the provision of solutions using the least resources possible.  They also looked at reverse innovation, which is the modification of  products designed in emerging markets for sale in developed countries.

The end result from these two very illuminating sessions was a policy question. Where should limited funding be directed in order to best sustain constrain based innovation? Is it in the conceptualization of ideas? The commercialization? A strategic mix of both? To be explored.

Resources:
Frugal Innovation Primer
Meeting Summary: ICT Innovations and Standards