A SUSTAINABLE data revolution is needed in Africa to drive a social, economic and structural transformation.
The just ended Africa Union (AU) and the United Nations Economic Commissions of Africa (UNECA) Conference of Ministers which was held in Addis Ababa on 25 to 31 March 2015, resolved that such a revolution will also make it easier to track our countries’ progress towards meeting globally agreed Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Political will is a principle that has a pivotal role to the implementation of the African data revolution. Countries must own the prioritisation, financing and leadership of this revolution.
Building this new African data ecosystem will however need to address a number of challenges, including the uneven coverage, lack of disaggregated data and the data stored in sector-specific silos. Data must be disaggregated to the lowest levels of administration by gender, age, income, disability, and other categories. People must be counted to make them count. Civil registration should be free and accessible.
Official data belong to the people and should be open to all. They should be open by default. Lack of accessible usable information that is open to all communities is also a challenge. There is a mismatch between available data and actual problems. There is also a lack of harmonisation of data collected by different sources in different formats and there is weak demand and capacity in the use of data at both national and local level.
The data community should embrace the Fundamental Principles of Official Statistics as a starting point. There is a need for governance and coordination of the data ecosystem. Other challenges include supply driven data subject to conditional financing and influences at odds with national priorities.
Technology, new forms of data and other innovations should be actively embraced. Data communities should promote a demand-driven data user culture spanning the entire ecosystem. Privacy and intellectual property rights should be respected.  Data should be translated into information that is simple, understandable and relevant. Information must be timely, accurate, relevant and accessible. Data must be driven by needs rather than for its own sake. The data revolution in all its facets, should be gender-sensitive.
The meeting observed that the building blocks for an African data revolution were already in place and that National Statistical Offices (NSOs) have long been the backbone of data production and management as they have been producing official statistics and supporting data activities to create accurate and timely data for decision-making.
In a revolution, today’s development challenges and prospects call for a broad data ecosystem that span the entire value chain driven by national priorities and underpinned by the Fundamental Principles of Official Statistics. This ecosystem must be inclusive of all forms of data,including official and other data and involve all stakeholders. There were also concerns over privacy, data protection and intellectual property. Insufficientfunding and dependence on external resources.
The vision of the Africa Data Revolution is to have a partnership of all data communities that uphold the principles of official statistics as well as openness across the data value chain, which creates a vibrant data ecosystem providing real-time user-driven disaggregated information for public good and inclusive development.Lack of common standards allowing comparison of data across sectors and countries.The lack of data on key issues such as governance, peace and security.
Key Actions
As a critical first step to strengthening the data ecosystem, review the capacity needs, legal and financial frameworks, participating institutions, data assets and gaps at national, sub-national and community level to recognize the roles of the various stakeholders and create a workable roadmap with clear milestones.
Create an inclusive data ecosystem involving government, private sector, academia, civil society and development partners that tackles the informational aspects of development decision-making in a coordinated way. Governments must play a pro-active role in engaging this community and other stakeholders should prioritise partnership with government.
Governments should take the lead in ensuring that the recurrent costs of production and dissemination of all required data is financed from sustainable domestic resources.
Existing National Strategies for the Development of Statistics should be revised to become more inclusive of all data communities. A lack of timely, accurate,  comparable relevant data has lead to having weak data for governance and accountability.
The development of Civil Registration systems that produce credible vital statistics must be a cornerstone of the data revolution. Likewise population, health, education, land and agricultural management information systems should be supported to ensure timely and accurate data to drive decision-making at national and sub-national level.
Public-private partnerships should be adopted, fostered and strengthened as a strategy for knowledge transfer and to promote sustainable collaborations.
All international norms and standards relating to official statistics should, where applicable, be extended to all data so as to improve their validity and credibility. Lack of common standards allowing comparison of data across sectors and countries.The lack of data on key issues such as governance, peace and security.environmental sustainability and human rights.
Innovative, integrated methodologies and technologies, including geospatial referencing, should be promoted to improve data collection, analysis and usage.