With citizens' lives on the line and government spending at record highs, ensuring accountability to citizens is imperative to maintaining trust and effectively managing procurement in response to COVID-19. Last week, President Uhuru Kenyatta directed the Ministry of Health to come up with a transparent, open method and mechanism through which all tenders and procurement done by Kenya Medical Supplies Agency will be available online. Much can be learned from DG's experience implementing an Open Contracting Portal in Makueni County, Kenya.

Achieving resilient public procurement goes beyond digitization and automation: data generated through these processes must also be used by government to make smarter decisions – particularly during crisis – and by civil society to hold government accountable for those decisions.

In developing the VIFAA Kenya Dashboard, we worked in partnership with Africafertilizer.org (AFO) and the International Fertilizer Development Center (IFDC) to understand the cycle of demand, supply, and use of Kenya’s fertilizer data. Grace Chilande of AFO and IDFC provides more information on why the dashboard is needed and how it will be used.

We are thrilled to announce that the Visualizing Insights for African Agriculture (VIFAA) Kenya Fertilizer Dashboard is now live! From fertilizer price to consumption, this dashboard makes Kenya’s fertilizer data easier to access, use, and share for national and county level decision making

Over the last twenty years, DG has morphed into a global organization with location-based personnel across the world. Where are we now? Who is Development Gateway and what do we prioritize?

It’s not every day in the open technology space that the opportunity to be the very first at something arises. But last week, we were a part of the launch of the Government of Makueni County’s Open Contracting Portal – Kenya’s first sub-national open contracting portal.

Since November 2018, Development Gateway (DG) has led the Visualizing Insights on Fertilizer for African Agriculture (VIFAA) program, a four-year partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

VIFAA Kenya implementation began in April 2019. Across VIFAA, we see cross-stakeholder partnerships as a key entry point to meet country and regional fertilizer needs. In Kenya, we are leveraging these partnerships to co-develop work plans that specifically address key data – and data use – gaps. Our approach to strategic decision-making starts with addressing those data gaps. In consultation with country stakeholders each step of the way, we will also identify data sources and co-design fertilizer dashboards.