Building the Will & Capacity for Opening Government

In September 2013, Edo State launched an open data portal, becoming the first state government in Nigeria and first sub-national government in Africa to do so. The Information and Communications Technology Agency (ICTA), was the government body driving the initiative. The Agency’s leadership viewed the portal as a vehicle for enabling greater transparency and accountability in the management of public resources. Led by a passionate, young staff in the Open Data Team and with the tagline “bringing governance to the people”, the portal held exciting potential for improving social outcomes.

But at launch, the portal did not have the resources to fully meet ICTA’s ambitions. The few dozen datasets released provided useful information but they weren’t accessible for the average citizen. A handful of featured applications showed the data’s potential, but they weren’t yet relevant for improving public services. Additionally, the Open Data Team’s counterparts in other government agencies did not have the same enthusiasm for sharing their data—both within government and with the public. Some were even suspicious of requests to do so.

Faced with this opposition, the World Bank engaged Reboot to help ICTA’s Open Data Team secure political support for its initiatives within government and to grow its capabilities for working with open data. Specifically, Reboot sought to boost the technical capacity of the team to deliver on its vision, while simultaneously working to achieve rapid enough results to increase the level of political support for the team’s work.

Gaining political support demanded that the Open Data Team demonstrate the value of open data on issues of concern to key government stakeholders. Using a mentorship model where our team worked multiple days a week on-site with the Open Data Team, we collectively identified state priorities where open data could support government, and then rapidly launched a few small pilot services focusing on these priorities to secure executive-level buy-in. The purpose of this close collaboration was to ensure the open data team could effectively demonstrate its utility to government stakeholders, while growing its technical capacity through applied training.

Select services for this project included:

• Strategic Planning

  We collectively defined a plan for how the team could achieve their vision. The plan included specific ways the team could secure institutional support, demonstrate proof of concept, and engage with citizens and the development community. We further assessed the context and constraints for producing a viable operational roadmap for work planning with limited resources. Finally, we worked together to revamp their internal processes for data collection, design, and project management; and to clarify their strategic positioning and service offerings.

• Organizational Development

  We helped the Open Data Team provide services to various agencies to demonstrate the utility of open data in addressing their interests. For example, Edo state was eager to develop its commercial agriculture sector, which required significant private-sector investment. We used data that had been released by multiple state agencies to map economic potential in the agriculture sector by geography and visualize opportunities within various value chains. We provided targeted communications design support to present the analyses in compelling, useful narratives. These helped build investor interest in the state’s proposed commercial agriculture development schemes, and were highly praised by state officials.

• Technical Capacity Development

  The Open Data Team had interest in developing useful products using its data, but limited engineering and design capabilities for doing so. We provided methodological training that included topics such as user-centered design, project management, agile development, and strategic communications to help the open data team develop useful products and user engagement strategies.

After only a few months, the Open Data Team was already working across government agencies and with many senior state officials to gather, aggregate, and present government data to assist in decision-making. Officials were pleased by their newly acquired depth of insight into key issues, such as the management of the state’s financial liabilities and cash. Building on these successes, the Open Data Team identified other state priorities and areas of concern where open data could prove useful. These activities led to the state governor mandating, within six months of our engagement, that all state agencies must make their data open and available.

The success of the Open Data Team has also attracted additional resources from both the federal government and international donors to continue its mandate. ICTA is now in the process of working with state agencies to release more data, while working on several custom applications for the state. Having secured more data from the state, ICTA has broadened its outreach and is coordinating with local technology community and civil society groups to support the use of its data for social initiatives.