Dedan Kimathi Uni students making complicated data look sexy

Team Ufahamu Kenya: Oroko, Njathika, Munene and Maranga

How do you make complicated and dull statistics interesting? Power Point presentations, the most common way of displaying ideas, processes and information is losing its allure. But there are more interesting ways of showing complicated data so that anyone can interact and understand the information.

Four students at Dedan Kimathi University, Nyeri, seem to have cracked the communication barrier between scientific research and presenting the findings through data visualization. The four have come with a data visualization platform – www.ufahamu.or.ke

Anthony Oroko says they developed the platform to “make sense of raw data and display it in an easy to understand,” hence the Swahili word of understand (ufahamu).  Oroko adds that Ufahamu is a tool of mapping data on maps while establishing relationships, with a bias in health information.

“It is a visual representation of data which basically means information that has been abstracted in some schematic form, including attributes or variables for the units of information,” explains Oroko, the Project Manager at Ufahamu.

Oroko, who is also the co-founder, is part of the team Ufahamu comprising of; Denis Munene (Co-founder/Lead Developer), Janet Maranga (Lead Operations), and Robert Njathika (Lead Researcher).

Visualization of Diabetes incidence in Kenya

Data visualization can send a million messages in just one image. But how can this be of relevant to society?

“With this power of relaying information our ability to combine different datasets representing various domains of interest on health, such as Malaria, Cancer and Diabetes among others, can be of great impact in decision making…in preparing government budgets or non-governmental programs,” Oroko expounds.

He gives an example of how the central government can use Ufahamu Kenya to plan, strategize and relay information to each and every county via a single Map of Kenya that can be daubed in the data visualization platform.

The Ufahamu team uses sophisticated geoJSON technology by combining NASA geodata and health data from reliable open data repositories like opendata.go.ke and visualizes it on a map that helps to communicate awareness of health related issues in relation to the resources available in its databases.

Ufahamu team has won several awards for their data visualization project including ‘Innovation of the Year 2012’ at a Hackathon at 88mph and ‘The International Space Apps Challenge by NASA’. This year they got a chance to represent Kenya at the Open Data Conference dubbed Okfest in Helsinki, Finland.

Like most start-ups, they had to pool resources to establish Ufahamu Kenya three years ago when they were starting, but with time they have managed to partner with other local companies in the same field.

Number of Malaria cases

“Ufahamu Kenya has also grown from awards and prize money won from various local and global challenges,” explains Mr. Oroko. “Currently, we are working on our incubation talks with a re-known incubation center on mapping and data visualization in Africa”.

He informs that the information portal can be accessed online via www.ufahamu.or.ke and it’s accessible to the public. “Also, developers can access our public codes on our github repository/Ufahamu Kenya.”

In Regard to whether the portal is commercial or open-source, The Developer has this to say “Ufahamu software products come as both commercial and open source. That is why we have some of our work listed publicly on github public repository. However, our service comes at a fee.”

Despite their project success and growth, the journey has had its share of challenges.

“Data visualization, being a new field of research not only in Kenya, has limited skills and expertise in the region. Thus, lack of skilled man power is a major challenge,” says Oroko. He intimates. “Apart from that, we struggle with the poorly formatted datasets from our local opendata portals.”

This, according to him, gives them a challenge of having to clean the datasets. Also getting latest information on particular domain of interest is a big challenge

The team however is optimistic noting that the government is putting effort in the field of open data will diversify the range of data.

“I believe it would be a good idea if the government incorporates some of our ideas into their future plans of open data as this is really the future.”

Oroko says their platform is yet to achieve what they have in mind in the long term.

“The use of this portal is not as strong as envisaged and we believe one of the main causes of this is the lack of utilization by companies whose can benefit from this portal. Growth therefore, will remain fragmented,” argues Denis Munene, the Lead Developer.

“Health NGO’s are looking for one-stop-shop platforms where they can get all their data needs. A number of players are tackling different aspects of this business opportunity, but none has yet achieved data visualization and integration of different variables on one platform,” Oroko further explains.

“By investing in a vastly improved platform, as well as integrating complementary innovative services and creating strong community linkages, Ufahamu is well placed to become a leader in the data visualization sector,” he concludes.