The Global Impact of Open Data

Chapter 9. Kenya’s Open Duka

Open Data for Transactional Transparency

By Andrew Young and Stefaan Verhulst

Summary: Open Duka is a platform developed by the civil society organization the Open Institute that aims to address issues of opacity in governance in the private and public sectors, promoting corporate accountability and transparency. As a case study, it exemplifies the challenge for open data initiatives to generate sufficient awareness and use necessary to achieve impact. Open Duka provides citizens, journalists and civic activists with a tool that gives insight into the relationships, connections (and, to some extent, the dynamics) of those in and around the public arena. The platform has the ability to create and visualize relationships between different entities ranging from organizations, individuals, tenders and contracts awarded. While a diversity of setbacks have led to limited impacts to date, the platform seeks to act as a core data set to enable these stakeholders to build third-party public transparency and public accountability apps or services, by allowing them to cross reference the Open Duka data against other data sets. Some of the data that can be found on Open Duka includes information published in the Kenya Gazette, a weekly publication released by the Kenyan government that publishes notices of new legislation, notices required to be published by law or policy and announcements for general public information.

Dimension of Impact: Empowering Citizens—Informed ...