Oluseun Onigbinde on open data holding government to account
Adam Oxford wonders how do you build a successful civil tech initiative in a country where only one in four people go online. Turns out the pioneering co-founder of Nigeria’s BudgIT, Oluseun Onigbinde, found a way…
on why BudgIT became a success “Everyone wanted us to scale really fast and to move into different places, because there’s such a big need for this kind of accountability project everywhere”
W hen Bill Gates was invited to South Africa to deliver the 14th Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture at the University of Pretoria in 2016, he spoke long and eloquently about the potential of technology to address pancontinental challenges around energy, job creation, financial inclusion, agriculture and health.
He spoke, naturally, about the work funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) across Africa, and some of the projects he’s seen in his travels. He also name-checked a handful individuals: Mandela and his widow, Graça Machel, his hosts from the university, Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg. And one social entrepreneur who has helped bring about change in the way Nigeria manages its money.
Oluseun Onigbinde is the 32-year-old co-founder of BudgIT ( www.yourbudgit.com), a civic tech organisation that makes public spending accountable through open data portals. It began in 2011 with a simple online tool to track spending in the national budget, and now provides transparency and accountability on a range of national and local government plans.
A year after Bill Gates’ speech, BudgIT was awarded a $3 million grant from BMFG and the Omidyar Foundation, securing its future for some time to come.
The organisation’s latest tool, Tracka, helps citizens keep track of promised capital spending projects – such as new schools and clinics – and enables them to report suspected issues around fraud and misallocation of funds.
There’s a burgeoning civic tech scene across Africa now, and Lagos is a mecca for West African startups and investors. But back in 2011 things were very different. The World Bank estimates that internet penetration in Nigeria, for example, was just 28 per cent (it’s around 40 per cent today) and government was highly resistant to scrutiny (it still scores just 17 out of 100 in the international Open Budget Index).
LinuxFormat caught up with Oluseun to find out how the project is going, and what progress has been made.
Linux Format: Tell us a bit about the background to BudgIT. How did it come about?
Oluseun Onigbinde: At the time I was working as a very traditional banker for First Bank, in Lagos. Co-Creation Hub ( www.
cchubnigeria.com) had just opened, in 2010, and had been designed as a place to support and encourage social innovation and projects that could utilise technology to help transform governance.
Co-Creation Hub holds a lot of civic tech hackathons, so myself and a friend, Joseph Agunbiade, entered one with the idea for BudgIT in 2011. Our key goal was to investigate how public projects work and encourage people to ask questions based on spending.
After the hackathon, we were encouraged to keep BudgIT going and take it up full-time. It was a scary move for me, because I was doing okay at the bank. But thankfully I got a fellowship from Ashoka to stabilise the move.
LXF: This kind of civic tech project was still fairly new all over the world, but especially so in Africa. Even Kenya’s iHub was only a year or so old. It was quite a small community across the continent, so what was the effect of that?
OO: Everyone wanted us to scale really fast and to move into different places, because there’s such a big need for this kind of accountability project everywhere. But what we found was that the scope of the work in Nigeria alone was huge. Nigeria is enormous – there’s nearly 200 million people and the state budget is 9.15 trillion naira (around $25 billion). There’s a lot still to be done here.
But most importantly, what we found was that the accountability issues were different in every country. Just because something works here doesn’t mean it will work in Ghana or Kenya or Uganda.
So we’re made the strategic decision to stick to Nigeria for at least the first decade. We do have an office in Sierra Leone as a pilot for pan-African expansion.
LXF: In a country where barely anyone had access to the internet, and interest in government accountability was low, how did you manage to persuade people to use BudgIT?
OO: It was difficult at the beginning to sell the idea to people. The initial response wasn’t overwhelmingly positive. What really got us started, though, was a big protest in 2012. Up until then, the government had been subsidising local fuel prices out of the money it makes from oil extraction. Prices were around $0.40 (2012 exchange rates) a litre, and most people used small generators running on cheap diesel [ according to The Guardian, the national grid provided just 40 W of energy for every citizen at the time, and the subsidy was worth about $6bn annually–Ed].
How the government sees budgit “Sometimes you’re the sworn enemy, sometimes it loves your work and the way that you help citizens engage with otherwise difficult information”
But then the decision was made by President Goodluck Jonathan to remove the subsidy overnight, because the money was needed for capital expenditure. There was a huge protest, and suddenly everyone was interested in where the money was going.
Nigerians began to ask real questions about state spending. The people took the view that if the government wanted to put up the price of oil, then they were entitled to see the evidence that justified the huge cost of governance.
So people began poring over budgets, and demanding that they be published. Government waste and corruption had always been a problem for the country, but now the public wanted to know that the new spending plans were actually going to be efficient.
We were lucky in that we got to ride the momentum of this wave of public interest. Civil activism, transparency and open data were all new at the time. There were lots of organisations springing up who wanted data and analysis, and we plugged that gap. There were campaigns on social media based around “following the money”, but what we brought in was an understanding of how to use the data through design, and how to engage with millennial audiences.
LXF: Sounds amazing, to be in the middle of a movement like that. How has BudgIT evolved over the years since, though?
OO: We’re constantly revising our thinking around budgets and accountability, challenging our understanding of the data and the audience. We’ve reached somewhere between two and three million people, and had a lot of feedback that’s changed the way we do stuff.
We looked at how we reach people at the local level. Tracka is all about giving power directly to communities, for example. We’re currently tracking 40 infrastructure projects, and keeping all the data about them open to communities on the ground.
LXF: The government in Nigeria hasn’t always been known for its tolerance of dissent and civil activism. We’ve seen open data organisations like MySociety in the UK working closely with the civil service, but what’s the reaction to BudgIT been?
OO: Sometimes government attitudes are fine, but sometimes it really doesn’t like us at all. It’s a bit of bromance to be honest. Sometimes you’re the sworn enemy, sometimes it loves your work and the way that you help citizens engage with otherwise difficult information.
For the federal government, it’s fairly easy to ask about transparency. Sometimes it’s hard because it brings up inconvenient truths and officials want to hold back data, but the general move is towards openness.
The state governments are completely different though. They simply aren’t used to being asked questions. Civil society is really weak at that level and there’s a cloud of impunity. So a lot of the work is gradual, there’s a lot of education needed. Government needs a lot of training around why these tools are useful and how to interact.
But the lesson we’ve found both inside government and for end users is that people do get really excited about the data we publish and the information we can offer, if we can show that it works.
LXF: What’s been the biggest success over the past seven years?
OO: The National Assembly. Without doubt. That was a real high point, when we got it to open up its spending reports, but it was a long process. We campaigned for two years and invested a lot of resources in that, because nothing about the Assembly and its spending was public. It simply would not publish its budgets, and we had to ask the same question over and over again. Getting that data at last, that gave me a lot of joy.
LXF: Why do you think no-one had fought for this data before?
OO: There are lots of reasons. Poverty and poor education… lots of things hold people back. You’re scared of government, you just trust the government or you don’t know what to ask. That’s why it’s so exciting when we create engagement. People like it when we show them our tools, and understand that little bit more about how government works. But we have to make the data useable – it’s not enough just to publish. People have to be able to see it and how it benefits them. It has to be actionable data. So before we put up any data now, we’re always make sure that it’s clear how it benefits ordinary people.
LXF: What was it like being name-checked by Bill Gates?
OO: Yeah, that was great. It’s a huge testament of our work. We continue to march on.
LXF: What are the challenges that lie ahead for BudgIT?
OO: The biggest challenge in Nigeria as a whole is that there was so much hope riding on the current government [
President Muhammed B uh ariwa selected in 2015, on a platform of anti-corruption–Ed ], and people are very disappointed. There’s a feeling that “all politicians are the same”.
Our challenge is to provide government the incentive to change. It’s a bit like raising a child. They’re the naughty government, you have to feed them, clothe them and educate them. You’d think they’d work out the benefits of transparency and accountability for themselves, but we need to be much more vigilant. We have to engage with them and keep the conversations around open government going, or they will not change. But we’re a vigilant entity.
LXF: And from a tech point of view, what are the challenges going to be like?
OO: We use a wide variety of technologies in our work. We’re a non-profit, we have to use whatever we can get our hands on. Everything we build we publish open source, but we use a lot of products like Slack and Google Docs among ourselves. Our key goal is that we have to be stronger in the way we communicate. We can’t just collect, process and publish data. We have to be more creative, be faster at what we do, focus on the storytelling.
Technically we’re pretty sound. We use Digital Ocean for hosting, which gives us the ability to scale when we need it – there’s always a huge spike in interest during budget time. There’s always security issues to be mindful of, though. Not everyone likes what we do, and we’ve spent nights fighting off DDoS attacks in the past. That leaves me disgruntled, but not much else.
LXF: What other Nigerian civic tech initiatives are you excited about?
OO: I’m excited about Connected Development and its work to mobilise citizens in local communities to demand effective action. I also like a budding startup known as Gavel. Gavel works to improve access to justice, especially for underprivileged persons. I’m also happy with what YIAGA Africa is doing with Watching the Vote on a data-driven approach for electoral integrity.