AfricanSpending - improving watchdog journalism by ‘mapping the money’

3

1. What do you propose to do? [20 words]

Improve African media’s insight into and analysis of government fiscal management by creating an AfricanSpending portal supported by a fellowship programme.

2. Is anyone doing something like this now and how is your project different? [30 words]

Not in Africa. OpenSpending works globally, but there is no pan-Africa effort to analyse or track fiscal transparency amongst African governments. No-one offers media fellowships to give journalists fiscal data wrangling skills.

3. Describe the real world challenge that you are trying to solve for African media [50 words]

African journalists seldom have the fiscal insight or technical skill to “map the money” in government budgets or public spending. As a result, media coverage is shallow, reactive, and fails to tell citizens how government action impacts their personal and local lives. AfricaSpending changes this by giving journalists powerful analytical tools and skills.

4. How and why will your solution work? [100 words]

AfricaSpending’s strategy is twofold: first, we will build an open access AfricanSpending portal that ‘liberates’ government budget and other fiscal data (including donor aid and corporate data, etc), offering powerful data visualisation and analysis toolkits, as well as the raw data itself. Second, we will run a fellowship programme to bring six fellows annually to OpenSpending in Berlin, two at a time for three months each, to learn how to work with the data, how to build new tools, and how to produce compelling journalism from the data that demystifies budgets into information that ordinary citizens understand and care about.

5. Who is working on it? [100 words]

This project is a partnership between Open Knowledge Foundation‘s (OKFN) OpenSpending initiative and the Kenya-based Open Institute (OI). OI is a NPO ‘think / do’ tank of open data experts that already manages landmark journalism technology programmes, including the Code4Kenya initiative that embeds coders into newsrooms, and Africa’s only continent-wide data journalism bootcamps (sponsored by the WorldBankInstitute). These initiatives are already resulting in new data-driven tools, apps, and evidence-based reportage. OKFN is a global NPO that promotes open content, including journalism programmes ranging from the Data Journalism Handbook and School of Data, to Spending Stories and other data narratives that seek to make public data accessible to anyone on the planet.

6. What part of the project have you already built? [100 words]

A team of African volunteers has built an experimental AfricaSpending portal with budget data from Cameroon, Kenya, South Africa, Tanzania, and Uganda. It serves as proof-of-concept that we can transform analogue budgets into digital datasets. The more sophisticated OpenSpending platform is already a mature technology for budget visualisation and analysis. It contains 150 datasets from 30 countries with powerful interactive visualizations for exploring data. AfricaSpending uses OpenSpending as a backend platform. Visualizations and tools built for either site will be shared between the projects. To go public, AfricaSpending needs serious coding work, data collection, and new visualisation tools.

7. How would you sustain the project after the funding expires? [50 words]

Getting international users to adopt the OpenSpending platform and to contribute functions, visualizations and data will increase its chances of long-term sustainability. The project is intended to kickstart a discussion about technological exchange, and it will be the responsibility of everyone involved to make sure that this conversation is ongoing.

Requested amount from ANIC: USD $55,000 (budget breakdown available)
Expected amount of time required to complete project: 12 months
Total Project Cost: USD $55,000

Name: Friedrich Lindenberg & Jay Bhalla
Twitter: @pudo, @jaybhalla
Organization: Open Knowledge Foundation & Open Institute
Country: Germany & Kenya