APRHC’s report “Delivering on the Data Revolution in Sub-Saharan Africa,” developed together with the Center for Global Development, will be the topic of a U.S. launch event in Washington, DC on Thursday, 9 October. If you can’t attend in person, we encourage you to livestream the event.
Despite improvements in censuses and household surveys, the basic building blocks of national statistical systems in sub-Saharan Africa remain weak. Measurement of fundamental statistics such as births and deaths, growth and poverty, taxes and trade, land and the environment, sickness, schooling, and safety is shaky at best. Huge revisions of headline economic statistics, such as GDP figures and global poverty, are evidence of weaknesses in the underlying basic data. They’re also evidence of the challenging political economy around the production of accurate, timely, and open data.
To address these issues, the working group’s report makes concrete recommendations to generate more – and more effective – funding of basic statistics, while establishing national statistics systems that can produce accurate, unbiased, and open data. Building on the report, and in light of excitement around big data, new measurement technologies, and broader access to data for the post-2015 agenda, Thursday’s event will focus on the production and use of data by citizens and the private sector. It will be keynoted by African Development Bank President Donald Kaberuka, with brief remarks from Data for African Development working group co-chair and APHRC executive director Alex Ezeh, and discussed by Mark Suzman of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Haishan Fu of the World Bank.
You can listen to Dr. Alex Ezeh’s remarks in the video below:
We’ll be watching for specific recommendations on how to move the global conversation, financial support, and technical assistance forward to truly revolutionize data for development progress. RSVP for the Data Revolution in Africa event or view the livestream on 9 October 3:00-4:00 PM ET here and download the report and policy brief.