The Open County Initiative

Since the establishment of counties, the Open Institute took to working with the county governments to ensure that their data was published online. Most counties have now developed a culture of publishing especially financial data among other indicators online. All this has been documented on OpenCounty.org. We have worked with Elgeyo Marakwet County where we created and launched the first-ever data desk.  We have also worked with Kilifi County collecting and publishing M&E data, as well as partnering with Makueni County Government to ensure that data is collected at the grassroots level – County ward level – making it easier for Wanjiku on the ground to understand and relate to

In the fight against COVID-19, most governments had to use different measures to track and combat the spread of the virus. Contact tracing, as well as GPS tracking, were commonly used, this begged the question, what happens to this data after the wind-down of COVID-19? 

 Open Institute During COVID-19

The momentum that every organisation had was slowed down during COVID-19 and the Open Institute was not spared. Our operations were impaired for some time while pivoting to remote working. As the pandemic wore on, we witnessed a lack of basic needs and sanitation materials among citizens.  In response to this, we came up with a reporting tool called Nuru. live that enabled Kenyans from every part of the country to report what was happening on the ground. The uptake of Nuru was positive from not only the citizens but also other CSOs. What Nuru did was shine a light where there was none and in return made it easy for the National COVID Response Team to have a targeted response to citizens in different regions.

Nuru’s success paved way for a collaboration with AMREF International, Advocacy Accelerator and the African Union. The three organisations had partnered to undertake a project geared towards onboarding community health workers (CHWs) to undergo training and capacity building to assist rapid response teams in identifying COVID cases and connecting them to care across 8 countries in East, West and  Southern Africa . The project, however, called for a reporting tool to manage the project activities and the Open Institute provided Sabasi app for CHWs to collect data. Sabasi has sped up the data collection process ensuring that the team now has real-time data to support their activities.