Columnists

Let’s step up efforts to address data gaps

data

When it comes to information, Kenya is not doing well. It seems surprising we should lag so far behind in our capacity to gather and present data, when we lead in Africa – or perhaps we do, we do according to our data – in financial services and financial centres, health facilities, and education.

But according to the World Bank, our statistical capacity is poor. Its indicator of a country’s capacity to produce statistics places South Africa at 82.2 out of 100. All our neighbours top us too, Tanzania at 73.3, Ethiopia 70, Uganda 68.9. Even Sudan records 63.3.But there’s some good news about our lowly 55.6 – we’re better than the DRC at gathering data, because it only scores 51.1.

So how and why did we get to be so very bad at information, and why does it matter? For sure, our leadership in e-government should make us masters of the data universe. Our iTax preceded the same from the UK by a full three years. We are not backwards either in our e-citizen portal and we have innovated as an out-and-out leader in data platforms such as Kentrade’s trade clearance services. But somehow, we have an aversion to facts that plays out everywhere: in our media, which is fact-thin column for column; in our social media, which is fact-creative; across our government, which speaks and acts without data, and across our private sector, which does the same.

Even as consumers, we’re not too worried about facts, it seems. Yet moving without facts is a straight path to extinction. Take air quality. Perhaps the most (and most surprisingly) contentious column I ever wrote was about Nairobi’s abysmal air quality and how it is killing us all. I received a post bag of such venom about my ‘wrongness’ that genuinely I wondered who was leading the ‘we have clean air in Nairobi’ PR drive, and what their interest was.Who stood to benefit from saying that our toxin laden, particulate-heavy daily air, instead of killing us from strokes, cancer and respiratory diseases, was actually the air of a fresh, mountain meadow?

That one still stumps me. But the problem, at the time, was the mere handful of studies of the city’s air quality. A study that found eggs in Dandora loaded with air-transported parabens (a straight line to cancer). A study that found young doctors living beside Kenyatta National Hospital falling to respiratory diseases as the incinerator outside their dorm filled their lungs with poisonous fumes.

A single set of air tests on Moi Avenue that showed astronomical pollutant levels. So our scant data left the stage wide open to headlines saying we had wonderful clean air, taking everyone’s eyes off the ball in ending the open burning, in getting filters on incinerators, in sitting behind those vehicles belting out black clouds of fumes.

Sadly, all of us who live or have lived in Nairobi have shortened our life span breathing it all in. But now, finally, at least we are measuring the problem, and we can say goodbye to the ‘fresh mountain air’ brigade. Our air is horrible, and killing us. According to sensors.africa, which is now measuring the air across Nairobi every 2 ½ minutes, we never get to reach safe levels in our air quality, always living below the point at which lives are definitively shortened.

Right now, as I write, we’re only 13.6 per cent below the level at which our lives get shortened. But yesterday, we were 64.5 per cent below that level. So no debate now about mountain air. Yet the same data hole is killing us everywhere. Unbelievably, and I still can’t credit this, our hospitals are not obliged to submit periodic data on the number of patients that die in their care.

So, no data in means no data out, and when you go to a hospital, you can’t know if it’s a high-killer hospital or a low-killer hospital. It’s a data gap that saw one hospital kill literally hundreds of young mothers before it was finally suspended to sort out its quality of care. So data matters. It shows us what’s killing us. And motivates and informs us to act so as not to die.