HURUmap Nigeria stemmed from the partnership between Nigerian National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) and Code for Africa (CfA) to improve accessibility to NBS data.
The NBS started with the enactment of the Statistics Act 2007 following the merger of the Federal Office of Statistics (FOS) and the National Data Bank (NDB).
NBS is the authoritative source and custodian of official statistics in Nigeria, and coordinates statistical operations of the National Statistical System comprising all federal ministries, departments and agencies, state statistical agencies and a number of other data providers.
Code for Africa and its partners work together to facilitate free access to information, particularly for civil society and citizens.
NBS and Code for Africa are committed to the growth of the civic technology community by ensuring the country’s data is readily accessible and freely available through the Nigeria HURUmap.
What’s the data behind the story?
HURUmap Nigeria provides the public, particularly infomediaries such as journalists and data enthusiasts, a user-friendly plug and play toolkit for locating interactive data visualizations, and embedding the same in their storytelling. The project's underlying data is quality-checked and solely sourced from the NBS.
The project is built on Wazimap, an open source platform by OpenUp and Media Monitoring Africa for making census data more understandable.
Code for Africa and its partners hate seeing civil society or anyone else being duped into wasting money unnecessarily on inappropriate technology or predatory consultancies.
There are thousands of civic apps and other technology solutions already available for reuse, free-of-charge, on communities such as GitHub.
Code for Africa is committed to help grow these resources and the global civic technology community, by making its code and data freely available. It is also committed to helping fellow African citizen agency organisations re-purpose and customise existing civic code as cost-effectively as possible.
The code for HURUmap Nigeria is available here.
All the data used by this project and other initiatives is available for free reuse on the openAFRICA.net portal. It is already the continent's largest repository of public data, despite being volunteer run, and offers data ranging from government budget and tender information, to data about parliamentarians and other public officials.