NAIROBI, July 8, 2011 The Kenya government today launched an open data portal, releasing several large datasets, including the national census and statistics on government spending at national and county levels.

President Mwai Kibaki launched the Kenya open data, www.opendata.go.ke at a public event with over 2,000 participants.

Kenya’s open access is one of the first and largest government data portals in sub-Saharan Africa. It will provide data access on the web and through mobile phones to researchers, web and software developers, journalists, students, civil society and the general public.

The initiative is spearheaded by the Ministry of Information and Communications and managed by the Kenya ICT Board in partnership with the World Bank, Socrata and private web and content developers. Set on a flexible, user-friendly format, it allows users to view and compare information at country-wide and county levels. Users can also generate maps and other visualizations and directly download underlying data for their own uses. read more