Kenya’s Open Data Initiative: Building Tools for Access

How we are building R packages and tools to make Kenya’s open data ecosystem more accessible to researchers and practitioners.

The Promise of Open Data

Kenya has been a leader in open data across the African continent, with government datasets spanning environmental assessments, demographic surveys, and economic indicators. However, accessing this data programmatically remains a challenge — most datasets require manual navigation of web portals, inconsistent file formats, and limited API access.

Building Bridges with R

Our approach is to build R packages that wrap these data sources into clean, documented, testable interfaces. The kenyaEIAFetcher package is our first public contribution — providing structured access to Kenya’s Environmental Impact Assessment database.

Each package follows enterprise-grade development standards: comprehensive documentation with roxygen2, full test suites with testthat, continuous integration via GitHub Actions, and pkgdown documentation sites.

What’s Next

We’re exploring additional packages for other Kenyan data sources, with a focus on environmental and governance data. If you’re working with Kenyan open data and want to collaborate, get in touch.