What and Why I Started Kuurgal

The blog is the first attempt, and mistakes will abound, hopefully unintentional ones. I look forward to your help and to learning a lot along the way.

As the world pushes towards data revolution and the big data frontier, Somalia finds itself unable to get even the smallest of data systems up and running to generate basic statistics on its citizen’s health or education, a result of state collapse and long-running conflict.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that data on Somalia is as scarce as a hen’s teeth. If you find any, it will be fraught with gaps and unknowns. You will find it in a disparate state, mostly in the silos of aid agencies, who fill the void left by the government.

Cost of Data Deficit in Somalia

I saw firsthand the untold challenges data deprivation has wrought on the country, having a significant negative impact on sound planning, design, delivery, and evaluation of public programs and delayed response to emergencies and droughts.

The lack of functioning data systems has rendered government institutions unaware of each other, making their operations inefficient at best. The civil society is also struggling to advocate effectively for important causes. In addition, the media’s ability to deliver rich, informative, and convincing content has been curtailed.

Even worse, the lack of open data and quality information about vital issues has fostered decades of citizen apathy and disengagement with governance and leadership.

Enter Kuurgal

Kuurgal is a side project born out of a belief that small data when well organized, analyzed, and shared openly, can have the transformative power to inspire progress and change lives.

To this end, the blog will serve in two ways: first, it will research, collate, clean, produce, and share open datasets focused on important public interest issues in Somalia.

Secondly, we all know that more data alone is not the answer, so every dataset we produce will be in support of data stories that aim to inform the national conversation, hoping somehow it influences an informed positive action.

Coverage and Content

While I have still not fully figured out the topics and types of data stories to cover, you can rest assured this site will not be a showroom for fancy charts, there will be no content that does not advance readers understanding and engagement around key issues.

The blog is the first attempt, and mistakes will abound, hopefully unintentional ones. I look forward to your help and to learning a lot along the way.

Finally, all datasets produced will be forever available in our GitHub repository. Please feel free to reuse the datasets to create your own stuff. If you do find any useful, don’t forget to tell us.

Let’s bridge the data deficit in Somalia.