StatCom7 participants call on Africa’s national statistical offices to embrace big data

The seventh meeting of the Statistical Commission for Africa (StatCom7) continued Wednesday with participants emphasizing that big data must be embraced by national statistical offices’ work plans, along with new data collecting and processing technology. This would be key to the continent’s efforts to effectively measure, evaluate and formulate the right public policies. Various presentations by member States, UN and private sector representatives highlighted Africa’s big data hub that will be hosted by Rwanda; the Global Working Group that explores the benefits and challenges of the use of big data for official statistics and compilation of sustainable development goal (SDG) indicators; Africa’s SDG data gateway; African Development Bank’s initiatives on big data and innovation; and the private sector's experience with big data on the continent. Africa’s big data hub, the participants agreed, will boost knowledge sharing among member States and information extraction from complex data sets. They agreed that capacity on data science and big data in national statistical offices remained limited on the continent raising the need for support from development partners to ensure big data informs the formulation of effective policies in Africa. Participants discussed ways to devise innovative statistical solutions to strengthen Africa's national statistical systems with a view to keeping decision-makers informed of economic, social and environmental developments in real time.

Bibliographic Details

Format:	Press release biblioteca
Language:	eng
Published:	2020-10
Online Access:	https://hdl.handle.net/10855/44541
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