Data on the Move: Three Months of Videos in Nairobi’s Matatus
Three months into the Matatu Stories Project, the videos are playing across Nairobi, the weekly check-ins are showing us how passengers are responding, and we’ve been capturing that impact on film.
The final phase of the rollout is complete. The last 50 USB flash drives have now been distributed, bringing the total to 111 matatu conductors and drivers who have received them. Each drive contains the four videos featuring matatu operators, domestic workers, and waste pickers, as well as the spoken word poem about informal workers.
Since the rollout began (check out blog 1 and blog 2 documenting our journey), we’ve been checking in regularly with the matatu operators playing the videos in their vehicles. So far, we’ve received 140 check-ins, up from 76 the last time we wrote to you.
Vehicle type from this round of check-ins (140 responses).
Number of trips per day, from this round of check-ins (140 responses).
What the check-ins are showing
The playback pattern has firmed up. A month ago, most operators were still finding their rhythm. Now the largest group, about a third of respondents (34%), says the videos played four days out of their working week, with another third saying three days (32%). That consistency matters because a video playing three or four days a week in a 33-seater doing six to ten trips a day is reaching a genuinely large, rotating audience. In fact, by this stage we calculate that we have reached an estimated 25,000+ commuters with our public service-style videos about informal work. Not bad!
Playback frequency from this round of check-ins (140 responses).
Equipment issues, from this round of check-ins (140 responses).
The technical side has also settled: about four in five operators (78%) now report no equipment issues stopping playback each week, up from a much rockier picture when we first rolled out.
The passenger reactions are where it's getting genuinely interesting. A few things stood out from this batch of check-ins, where we ask the matatu drivers and conductors to give us free-text responses:
There's a bit of a generational split, conductors describe older passengers “wamama na wazee,” gravitating to the worker-story videos themselves, while younger passengers are more drawn to the spoken word piece.
Some passengers now ask the conductor to play the videos as soon as they board, rather than waiting to notice them, which is great!
People are asking sharper questions than before: how the workers in the videos were chosen, and whether they can verify the organisation behind them. A couple of conductors mentioned passengers wanting to see “the organisation's page” to confirm the data is real.
That last one especially, people wanting to check we're legitimate before they trust what they just watched, felt like a sign the videos are being taken seriously, not just watched and forgotten. But it also left us thinking about how we can improve the way we explain where the data comes from and how it was collected. At the moment, we say in the videos who collected the data (Haki Data Lab and Data4Change), and we provide a URL to the website that has the data, but this might not be enough for those commuters who are curious and/or sceptical. And fair enough, it's great that people are questioning the sources! Definitely something we will take with us moving forward as we see how we can make the “who and why” of data collection and storytelling a more compelling and transparent part of the project.
The bigger news this month: we finally shot the Impact Video! We secured a matatu and spent the day on it, interviewing passengers, the conductor, and the driver about the four videos they'd just watched and about their own experience of being part of this project.
Liston (Lead Matatu Researcher) interviewing commuters in Nairobi inside a matatu screening the videos.
The Impact Video also explains why this project exists. Liston and Mike a.k.a. us, the Lead Matatu Researchers, talked about how the rollout happened, and Antony Adoyo, HDL's Executive Director, joined to talk about why the project exists at all.
One thing we were deliberate about: the video doesn't just tell people the project is working; it shows the evidence. We wanted the audience to see that this isn't just a nice idea we're hoping is landing; it's something we're measuring, week over week, and adjusting based on what operators tell us.
“The strongest research doesn't just inform policy. It starts conversations too. Sometimes those conversations begin on our way to work or our journey home.”
Liston Onyango, Lead Matatu Researcher
Although we practiced what we, as data researchers, were going to say, we kept the passenger, driver, and conductor interviews totally free and unscripted: no feeding people language, no yes/no questions, just space for honest, self-reflective answers. We asked passengers what stood out to them about the videos, whether anything surprised them, whether it changed how they think about matatu workers, waste pickers, or domestic workers, and whether they'd want more of this kind of content on their commute. We asked the driver and conductor how passengers have reacted, whether it's changed how people treat them, and what's surprised them most since they started playing the videos. The video is with our editor Sideny now, so we don't have final cuts of those conversations to share yet, but the questions alone tell you what we're hoping the footage shows: curiosity turning into something closer to respect.
The video is in post-production, and we're aiming for something that feels energetic and honest rather than like a conventional institutional project video, proof that data communication doesn't have to live only in reports and presentations, and that the people whose lives became data also helped decide how their stories would travel. We're looking forward to sharing it once it's ready, alongside the strongest of the monitoring data we've been collecting since week one. We'll let you know when it's out!