ACTIONABLE INFORMATION

What Problems Keep People Awake At Night?

Code for Kenya uses data to give citizens hyper-local and hyper-personal information to make better informed decisions about bread & butter issues.
Code for Kenya also builds technology tools to amplify citizen voices.

AGENCY

We empower citizens.
Strong democracies rely on engaged citizens who have actionable information and easy-to-use channels for making their will known. We support civic watchdogs, government and social enterprises to meaningfully engage with citizens.

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ACTION

Our society is asymmetric.
The balance of power rests with government and corporate institutions, at the expense of citizens, where citizens are treated as passive recipients of consultation or services. We build actionable data and action-orientated tools that give ‘agency’ to citizens.

ECOSYSTEMS

By the people, for the people.
We build ecosystems, because creating digital democracies is too big a task for any one organisation. We invest into existing communities and partners, and reuse existing tools and standards, because all of our work is better if we are all connected.

GET INVOLVED

Do You Want To Help Build A Better Future?

OPPORTUNITIES

Great Ideas Are Just The Start.

Innovators Also Need Seed Funding + Technologies + Mentorship To Change The World

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We’re On A Mission To Make Kenya Work Better In The Digital Age

Our Projects Are Designed To Help Government Be More Responsive to Citizens

HURUmap

What’s the data behind the story? HURUmap gives infomediaries like journalists and civic activists an easy ‘plug & play’ toolkit for finding and embedding interactive data visualisations into their storytelling. HURUmap’s underlying data is quality-checked, from reputable official sources including the government Census, PEPFAR and Uwezo.

HealthTools

Is your doctor a quack? Are you being overcharged for medicines? Where is your nearest medical specialist? HealthTools give citizens localised answers to everyday health challenges via SMS and the web to help the mwananchi get the best medical care. Data is from reputable official sources, with additional crowd verification.

PesaCheck

Is electricity penetration in Kenya 40% or 27%? Is Kenya’s unemployment rate really 10%? What is the real pupil to teacher ratio in the country? Public leaders and journalists often get it wrong, leaving the public and policy makers with incorrect information. PesaCheck’s data-driven fact-checking tackles the problem.

openAFRICA

Government data is only one side of the story. Where’s all the comparative data from academic think tanks, civil society researchers, and citizen data initiatives? openAFRICA is the continent’s largest platform for independent data, with a strong Kenyan collection from the nation’s leading non-government data creators.

africanSPENDING

Taxpayers struggle to understand how government spends their hard-earned money. Mwananchi also struggle to help government understand what citizens’ real priorities or needs are. africanSPENDING offers a suite of interactive tools that support civic engagement around public finance data, strengthening participatory governance.

africanCOMMONS

Why is everyone reinventing the wheel? Massive amounts of money and time are being wasted on rebuilding solutions for digital democracies and open data. africanCOMMONS showcases carefully selected best-of-breed open source civic technologies that have already been ‘battle tested’ elsewhere, for possible re-use in Kenya.

WanaData-Ke

WanaData-Ke is a network of female journalists working on changing the digital media landscape by producing and promoting data-driven news and applying digital technologies to their storytelling.

STEAL OUR STUFF!

Everything We Build Is Open Source. We Want You To Reuse It, Free Of Charge.

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Partners

Our Work Is Made Possible Through Partnerships With the Following Organisations:

Code for Kenya is a member of the continental Code for Africa federation. The federation is Africa’s largest network of indigenous civic technology and open data laboratories, with affiliate members in 10 African countries and funded projects in a further 12 countries. The federation works with governments, grassroots citizen organisations, and the media to help liberate data and empower citizens. Our programmes include fellowships, tool building, data digitisation, and knowledge development, with a strong emphasis on civic engagement.

EVENTS

Stop Talking. Start Building.

Join Us To Build An Ecosystem Of Civic Innovators.

Network with a growing community.

Opening data and building civic technology that brings tangible social change requires a diverse collection of minds and skills. Our events, from bootcamps to dataquests, focus on building multi-disciplinary teams and communities.

Learn new things.

Discover tools for working with data processes that turn raw open data into something which can make a difference to someone else’s life. Join one of our workshops or knowledge shares (meetups) to see the world of data and civic engagement in a new way.

Help us open data.

We are community focussed and creating an environment where anyone can open data and create a project, initiative or idea that can be taken forward, either by our core team or a community collaboration. Join us at a lab or dataquest to co-create a better Kenya!