Ministry and Public Institution Data in Open Format (BF0011)

What is the public issue for which the commitment is made to address?: The control of government action is restricted and this is due to difficulties in getting access to public data.; What is thecommitment?: Challenges : • Stimulating innovation and digital business creation ; • Increasing citizen participation ; • Strengthening democracy ; Global Objective : Making public data easily accessible in Burkina Faso Expected outcomes : • 500 set of data are available on the data.gov.bf Portal; How will such action contribute towards solving this public issue?: Availability of data will provide means for citizens to control government action and question Authority based on facts.; Why is such commitment relevant in terms of PGO Values?: Access to public data helps to ensure transparency and is a foundation for efficient citizen participation, which are values treasured at PGO.; Additional Information: This commitment builds on a wider public data opening policy existing since 2013.

11. Collect and publish data ^[103] produced in Ministries and public institutions in open and accessible ^[104] format by all

Language of the commitment as it appears in the action plan:

“Collect and publish data ^[105] produced in Ministries and public institutions in open and accessible ^[106] format by all”

Challenges:

• Stimulating innovation and digital business creation;
• Increasing citizen participation;
• Strengthening democracy;

Global objective: making public data easily accessible in Burkina Faso

Expected Outcomes:

• 500 sets of data are available on the data.gov.bf Portal

Milestones/Deliverables/Activities:

Raising public actors awareness on data access

Hosting data collection campaigns

Processing and publishing 500 sets of data collected in open data

Start Date:  November 2017                                                                                     End Date:  June 2019

Action Plan is available here

Context and Objectives

This commitment addresses a lack of control for government performance, which, this action claims, is exacerbated by the difficulties in accessing good public statistics. In an effort to improve the country’s economic progress through technology, information, and communication tools (TICs), the government created the National Agency for the Promotion of Information and Communication Technologies in February 2014 (ANPTIC by its acronym in French). [107] The ANPTIC, in partnership with the World Bank and the Open Data Institute, launched the Burkina Open Initiative (BODI) on 5 June 2014.

According to the ANPTIC’s Director General in 2014, BODI’s goal is to publish non-sensitive data produced by administrations, the private sector, and civil society on a single platform, and to encourage its reuse. [108] According to Agnès Kabore, representative of the Center for Democratic Governance, most documents are available in PDF Format. [109] However, documents are not available in a reusable format and CSOs have expressed their preference for CSV and Excel formats. [110] The BODI section of the ANPTIC website has links to four reusable data applications, one open data platform, and one open election platform. [111] A CSO member expressed that over 200 datasets had been published thanks to the Open Data Portal in 2016. [112]

Despite improvements in developing open data platforms, citizens face challenges in accessing information and thereby are limited in their ability to influence their government. As of 2014, 3,440 individuals submitted information requests to Burkina Faso’s Ombudsman regional and headquarters. [113] According to the Open Burkina Project Coordinator, the lack of implementation of Law 051 of 2015 prevents citizens from successfully demanding information and holding the government accountable. The government and stakeholders could coordinate to prioritize which data should be published. Also, the government should maintain platforms to ensure functionality and publish data in a predictable, periodic, and sustainable fashion. [114]

In this context, the commitment seeks to enable citizens of Burkina Faso access to public data and statistics. The activities aim to raise awareness among public actors on open data, organize data collection campaigns, and publish 500 databases in an open data format. This commitment is relevant to the OGP value of access to information in that the government will disclose more information through the publication of datasets and develop an open data culture within public institutions.

As written in the action plan, some of the objectives, results and activities are specific enough to be objectively verified. Verifiability can be assessed by looking at the number of datasets published and processed in open data format, and the number of data collection campaigns conducted. There is room for clarity. For instance, the first two activities do not provide enough information as to the number of public actors to be trained or how many data collection campaigns will be conducted. There is also no way to monitor the effectiveness of the raising-awareness initiative. As for activity number three, the commitment does not provide a baseline defining the current number of available datasets, which prevents verifiability.

If implemented as written, the commitment will contribute to solving the problem, but not to a full extent. Therefore, the potential impact of this commitment is minor. The commitment’s activities seek to publish information and build open data capacity. While the commitment will produce 500 datasets in open data format, there are no specific activities addressing citizens’ needs to hold government institutions accountable for policies concerning publication of data. As the implementation decree for Law 051 has not been yet been approved, citizens cannot effectively demand that the government publishes data, regardless of the government’s efforts to make data available. In addition, access to open data is compromised by the country’s access to internet rate of 11%. [115]

Next steps

• This commitment could be continued and improved. In order to enhance the commitment’s design, rephrase activities in quantitative terms (e.g., the number of campaigns, the number of datasets, the number of actors trained).
• Improve coordination between the government and CSOs to prioritize which data tools to share and periodically maintain these tools.
• Include specific activities ensuring that citizens have means to hold government accountable for publishing data as requested.
• Consider a monitoring and evaluation mechanism to track the effectiveness of awareness campaigns for government officials.
• A major binding constraint for this commitment is the lack of implementation of Law 051 of 2015 concerning the access to information, which is related to Commitment 10. Draw upon recommendations for Commitment 10 to adopt mechanisms that accelerate the Law’s implementation.