A consortium of African organization including africapractice, iHub and Code for Africa, with support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has announced the launch of ‘Takwimu’, an Africa-focused digital information service for people working in the human development arena.
‘Takwimu’, a Kiswahili word loosely translating to data or information, empowers African changemakers with access to high quality visual data, thereby supporting their work to educate, influence and advocate for deeper development impact.
All the content is visualised and packaged to be easily understood and freely shared. The content includes expert analysis of the key stakeholders, decision processes, policies, organisations and budgets that are driving development outcomes – combined with access to a growing body of national and sub-national statistics in the health, agriculture, education and financial inclusion sectors.
Takwimu’s goal is to make it much easier for development champions and storytellers to find, download, and share high quality analysis and data visuals in their own materials. By opening out access in this way, Takwimu aims to stimulate broader participation in development policy and programming.
It covers 10 countries: Burkina Faso, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia. The service plans to make French, Swahili and Amharic versions of the key content available later in the year.
Speaking during the launch, Onyebuchi Ajufo, spokesperson for Takwimu, commented: “Takwimu will support a community of development storytellers and practitioners as they use analysis and data to create impact through their publications, reports, presentations and other content. We’d like to thank the many talented NGOs, development officers, data scientists and journalists across the continent who have contributed to building Takwimu and we hope the service is a useful contribution to the African development community.”