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WhatsApp’s new Terms & Conditions: What they mean to us

Eight years after it gained popularity in Kenya, WhatsApp is now not only owned by Facebook but has more features added to it making it more appealing for masses and increasing its penetration in most countries worldwide. With the new ownership came new terms and conditions in 2012 which most users agreed to without reading. A new set of terms and conditions were unveiled by the company early this year which caused quite a stir online. Data protection experts, governments and civil societies went up in arms with the new terms and the extent in which individual and business data is collected from the platform. At the Open Institute, we convened an informal lunch time chat to discuss the new terms and conditions and to try and explain what the impact of them would be to the everyday citizen.

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The Next Best Time To Restore Data Rights Is Now!

Written by ‘Gbenga Sesan This is a guest blog written by the Executive Director of Paradigm Initiative, a key #RestoreDataRights partner from the Nigerian region, emphasising the importance of data governance issues in Africa as outlined in the Restore Data Rights declaration which calls for responsible data use on the continent. On January 1, 2020,…

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My Experience as a Remote Worker

In this blog, Mukanda shares her personal experience with working from home. From time to time, we feature posts by different team members and encourage them to give their personal thoughts and opinions on various topics of interest to the organisation. My alarm clock went off at 4.30 a.m, I woke up ready to conquer…

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The data collection and digitization process for Citizen Generated Data in Elgeyo Marakwet

Deep in the heart of the county of champions, in the scenic and partly remote wards of Arror, Tambach, Kayego and Kaptarakwa, the activities for the citizen-led household census in Elgeyo Marakwet County are underway,  targeting data collection in 101,000 households. The training of enumerators,  data collection and data entry activities have been taking place…

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The importance of stakeholder engagement to ensure participation and successful project results

When undertaking any project, it is important to note that it will usually involve multiple stakeholders; and each one potentially has the ability to speed up, slow down or completely obstruct the project’s progress.  Most importantly, stakeholders play a role in ensuring steady progress, focusing on goals and improvement of the general quality of project…

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Design considerations for the citizen-driven census in Elgeyo Marakwet County

In our work in citizen-generated data, we have had experiences that have demonstrated that the results of our projects are usually high-impact and long-lasting. This inspires us to keep working with citizens empowering them to use data to drive change within their communities. When citizens understand the power of data, they turn into data champions…

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