Support to open government, data, and accountability in Tanzania : progress report (English)

The World Bank activity under the Support to Open Government, Data and Accountability in Tanzania (SOGDAT) programme is a three-year Technical Assistance aiming to establish open data and support service delivery tracking in Education, Water and Health... See More + The World Bank activity under the Support to Open Government, Data and Accountability in Tanzania (SOGDAT) programme is a three-year Technical Assistance aiming to establish open data and support service delivery tracking in Education, Water and Health sectors. This document represents a third year progress report on World Bank executed activities under SOGDAT. Open Data is data, which anyone is free to use, re-use or redistribute it, subject at most to measures that preserve provenance and openness. The World Bank identifies two dimensions of data openness: 1. The data must be legally open, which means they must be placed in the public domain or under liberal terms of use with minimal restrictions. 2. The data must be technically open, which means they must be published in electronic formats that are machine readable and preferably non-proprietary, so that anyone can access and use the data using common, freely available software tools. Data must also be publicly available and accessible on a public server, without password or firewall restrictions. The World Bank has led the technical support to Tanzania’s Open Data Initiative through UK Aid funded SOGDAT Programme from 2014. This followed the Government of Tanzania (GoT) joining the Open Government Partnership (OGP) in 2012 and committing to: (i) promote public integrity and transparency, enhance proper management of public resources and fight corruption; and (ii) strengthen mechanisms for citizens’ engagement and participation in improving service delivery in their own areas.Following the development of the Tanzania OGP National Action Plan 2012-2013 the Bank and Government of Tanzania conducted jointly an Open Data Readiness Assessment (ODRA) in 2013, which led to articulating main drivers for Tanzania Open Data Initiative (TODI): transparency, efficiency, service delivery and innovation. A revised plan for OGP implementation between 2014 and 2016 provided for a longer time frame to achieve commitments and maintained an explicit category for establishing an open data programme.Other benefits, such as government cost savings or increased investment in data quality resulting from the need to publish raw data, are more easily measured in the short-run.The Open Data Barometer places Tanzania in the “capacity constrained” cluster of countries whose open data initiatives are challenged by limits in government, civil society or private sector capacity, internet penetration, and data collection and management. The Bank’s support through SOGDAT has focussed on three pillars: 1) The policy and legal framework; 2) The supply of datasets; and 3) The demand for open data.This report maintains the original Data supply and data demand structure of previous years, but in order to fully illustrate the steps involved, the Data Supply model is expanded into its component phases of: Collection, Sharing, and Analysis. The Data Demand model remains with its focus on data users but will also distinguish between service providers, infomediaries and basic skills capacity building.  See Less -