OK Somalia: Data Literacy Training Program

In recent years Data Literacy has become a global issue and many data literacy initiatives have been documented throughout the world, particularly in the field of Higher Education. Open Knowledge Somalia introduces an initiative for Data Literacy to assist researchers, data journalists, scholars, librarians, and other professionals. This initiative intends to enhance and improve soft skills and information literacy of the Somali community, as well as bring to light homemade research publications.

This program will accommodate students, librarians and other professionals from different disciplines who are working on research projects or academic publications. The beneficiaries will be acquainted with open data and open access and how to utilize it in their work. They will acquire information and resources in their disciplines, use different search tools effectively.

The Training 

Our first training was held on the 14th of August. The 1st session of the training was mainly discussed on the understanding of data, data gathering methods,  the available data on the web and data validation. In the 2nd session the topics discussed included data analysis, data visualization, selecting a visualization method, design for visualizing data and storytelling with data. 

The participants who mostly are in the field of using data showed how is important to their daily work. We learned that upskilling of data usage is essential for the improvement of the creativity of the social workers, researchers, and innovators.