Launching Africa's Information Highway
The African Development Bank Embarks on an Ambitious Program to
Revolutionize Data Management and Dissemination in Africa
The African Development Bank (AfDB)
(http://www.afdb.org) has launched an ambitious program to significantly
improve data management and dissemination in Africa. The ultimate goal of
the program is to facilitate wider public access to official statistics and
to support countries in their efforts to improve data quality and
dissemination for better policy formulation, monitoring and evaluation. The
program was launched in November 2012 as part of the Bank's broader
statistical capacity building program in Africa. Work has been going on
concurrently in several African countries and institutions and has been
completed in the following 13 countries and one Pan-African institution:
Cape Verde, Democratic Republic of Congo, Cameroon, Congo, Malawi,
Mozambique, Namibia, Rwanda, South Sudan, Tanzania, Tunisia, Zimbabwe,
Zambia and the African Union Commission. The plan is to finalize the
development and installation of data portals in all 54 African countries and
16 sub-regional and regional agencies by the end of July 2013.
The program involves the development and installation of common IT platforms
in all 54 countries and 16 sub-regional and regional organizations in
Africa. The aim is to establish live data links between the Bank and
National Statistical Agencies, Central Banks and Line Ministries in African
countries, on one hand, and linking the countries with each other and with
other external development partners, on the other. This will facilitate easy
data exchange, validation, analysis and dissemination using common
international standards and guidelines. This approach will not only ease
access to statistical data and metadata in African countries, it will also
help to improve the quality of the country data by making it more
internationally comparable, harmonized, meaningful, and ultimately more
usable.
The IT platform being deployed in Africa also features a data submission
tool for seamless transfer of country data to the AfDB's statistical portal.
In this context, the AfDB Statistics Department has teamed up with the IMF
Statistics Department to help countries prepare National Summary Data Pages,
as part of the preparation for subscribing to the enhanced IMF Special Data
Dissemination Standards (SDDS-Plus). The Bank has also partnered with the
European Union to provide easy access to agricultural data and to tools for
simulating various agricultural policy alternatives. The data submission
facility will position the AfDB as the key depository for development data
in Africa and the hub for data-sharing with other international development
partners. This will also significantly reduce the data reporting burden of
African countries since data will now only need to be uploaded once into the
AfDB system and then shared with various development partners.
This AfDB initiative provides a unique opportunity for African countries to
take the lead in implementing statistical standards at a regional level and
make their data easily accessible through a common platform. It will also
significantly revolutionize data management and dissemination in Africa, and
reposition the continent for more effective participation in the global
information economy.