The Second Coming: On Data Colonialism and the Rush to the New Frontier

The Ebola epidemic wrought untold damage and suffering to the people, politics and economics of Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia. It still does.  And will for some time into the future. But the Ebola epidemic was a big economic boon for a whole lot of businesses outside of Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia. Outside of Africa even. And mostly in the West. It still is.  And will for some time into the future.

And no sector of the economy in the West benefited more than data brokers. How? Let’s go to the Ebola Open Data Jam. This Washington, D.C. event was designed to be held simultaneously with others in New York, Winchester (UK), Kampala (Uganda), Monrovia (Liberia) and Freetown (Sierra Leone). I know that Freetown wasn’t able to jam with us. I don’t know if Kampala and Monrovia were able to join the party, but if they did, it was nowhere close to those of us in the West, especially in D.C., which pulled no stops to make the event the phenomenal success that it was. There were many reasons for this lopsided attendance, most of which are the usual suspects, namely the intractable problems of unreliable internet connectivity and electricity supply, and (for the case of Freetown and Monrovia, where Ebola was raging) the wisdom of staying away from any contact with any other person.

The DC event, held February 21, 2015, was part of the annual Washington, DC Open Data Day Hackathon. This Saturday event at the World Bank headquarters was jam-packed: King Kong the raging abominable snowman got nothing on us! Practically all members of the major sponsors were there, including World Bank, USAID, WHO, CDC and a much larger contingent from private companies big and small.

The goal of course was well intentioned: To capture online data available in the public domain or with Creative Commons license, render them in actionable formats and make them available to anyone (especially policymakers in Africa) who wants to use them to combat Ebola. As I mentioned in an earlier entry, all the data jammers present could be placed into two categories, namely the for-profiters (i.e. the commercial data brokers) and the rest of us.

Let’s start with the commercial data brokers at the event, mostly highly innovative small-business entrepreneurs with lots of IT savvy. They openly and actively participated in the jam like the rest of us. Some even co-sponsored the event. But their purpose was devoid of any scheme or desire to help African leaders govern better and more responsibly. Or to help eradicate Ebola.  Their goal was simple. They saw in Ebola an opportunity to make money and all their engagements and interactions with any form of data (opened, shared or otherwise) were solely and ultimately directed to that end.

Thus, they collected any and all forms and sources of open data that they could at the event. 

But perhaps much more important to my argument, they later collected data from these African countries, probably without the knowledge or consent of their leaders. How? 

I would use one particular company, which shall remain nameless, as an example. This company reached out to one of the two major mobile carriers in one of the three most affected countries. This carrier allowed them to access and download all the numbers of all their two million-plus subscribers. Using text-based surveys and SMS geotagging, the company was able to accurately identify Ebola hotspots in real-time. It then sold such data on a subscription basis to program sponsors for a very, very handsome profit.

Clearly this example raises a lot troubling questions relating to individual informational security and privacy, as well as national security. But much more relevant to my argument is that this data broker, like hundreds of its kind sprouting all over the world, and mostly in the West, recognizes and is taking advantage of a huge market opportunity in the exploitation of data on, in and from developing countries, mostly in Africa. And there’s nothing most African governments and quite a few in Asia, the Caribbean and Latin America, can at present do about this data colonization.  The magnitude of this colonization could be gleaned from the list of sponsors at the Third International Open Data Conference in Ottawa, Canada. Quite a few were commercial data brokers who demoed their services there, which in most cases were comprised of data collected from developing countries, thanks to cutting-edge data-management hardware and software tools.

For the rest of us at the Ebola data jam in Washington DC on a very snow-heavy Saturday February 21, 2015, our actions were arguably informed by the following assumptions:

1.      That a significant reason why Ebola was raging out of control in the three most affected countries was because of insufficient or no efficacious data on such basic things as number of hospitals and number of beds per hospital.

2.      That if we made said data available directly to policymakers or through program sponsors or implementing partners, they will readily and effectively use them to successfully combat the epidemic.

These assumptions were troubling to say the least. They were stripped of all the political, economic and sociocultural realities not only on the ground but also, it must be said, within some program sponsors themselves, none the least being World Health Organization.  But let us go back and critically examine the aforementioned assumptions.

1.         That a significant reason why Ebola was raging out of control in the three most affected   countries was because of insufficient or no efficacious data on such basic things as number of hospitals and number of beds per hospital.

·         If this is true, why? To what extent might this be due to bad governance, specifically  chronically poor records management by its leaders?

·         Is this in fact true, given that we here in the West (and anyone anywhere else with Internet connectivity) could access the same data that we did?

·         Okay, one may well counter that the problem is not with access to the data per se, but with the technical know-how to reformulate and (re)package them to enable effective use by policymakers. But to what extent would this be true? Examples abound of highly qualified programmers and other IT specialists, most citizens, living and working in the Ebola-affected countries.

2.         That if we made the data available directly to policymakers or through   program sponsors or implementing partners, they will readily and effectively use them to successfully combat the epidemic.

·         Again, assuming this is true, and that the Ebola epidemic was due significantly to poor records management by leaders of the affected countries, isn’t our faith woefully misplaced that the same leaders would put the data to their intended use?

The assumptions underlying these well intentioned and well-funded activities to a large extent inform the very high priorities that program sponsors place on such Open Data-related programs in developing countries as Open Government initiatives and Open Portal initiatives. They reflect in short my observation that data in and on developing countries are not seen as valuable assets in and of themselves. That they are seen merely as tools/indicators of good governance, health, agriculture, education, etc. As a result, program sponsors, instead of helping support the nascent but struggling commercial data brokerage industries in these countries, spend an inordinate amount of resources on the establishment of government institutions geared primarily towards transparency, accountability and good governance.

While these activities are doubtless laudable, their success is doubtful, for many reasons. Among these are the fact that their implementation is disproportionately and ill-advisedly placed in the government sector, where institutions newly established to implement the programs are often staffed with unqualified cronies well paid from donor funds. Said institutions atrophy when funds run out and/or when new political parties come to power, in effect robbing them of the continuity critically required for the programs to succeed and thrive.

The inclusion of non-government actors in this game plan rarely go beyond engagement with local activists and similar civil society members. Doubtless, better recognition and support are needed of local private-sector actors who are more (if not entirely) concerned with making money within the local commercial data brokerage industry, but who, in so doing, are much more likely to help engender the responsible governments that by any indicator we desire, but with much less resources and much more bang for our taxpayer bucks.

Clearly, we need a new paradigm of data management for social change and development. Hopefully there will be room for greater discussion of this in future open data conferences, most significantly the Africa Open Data conference in Dar-Es-Salaam, Tanzania.