The New Data Sources for Official Statistics in Africa: Challenges and the Way Out
Conference
65th ISI World Statistics Congress 2025
Format: IPS Abstract - WSC 2025
Session: IPS 735 - Advancing Official Statistics in Africa in the Digital and Technology Era
Thursday 9 October 2 p.m. - 3:40 p.m. (Europe/Amsterdam)
Abstract
The ability to incorporate new sources of data and to benefit from emerging technologies such as Web Technologies, Remote Data Collection methods, User Experience Platforms, and Trusted Smart Statistics will become increasingly important in producing and disseminating official statistics. The skills and competencies required to automate, analyze, and optimize such complex systems are often not part of the traditional skill set of most National Statistical Offices in Africa. The adoption of these technologies in obtaining official statistics requires new knowledge, methodologies and the upgrading of the quality assurance framework, technology, security, privacy, and legal matters. The new sources data provides opportunities to obtain timely, costless, higher precision, completeness and less burden official statistics, and it can also be used to monitor the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) and it 169 indicators, especially where traditional data collections are missing. Currently in Africa, more than half of the SDG indicators have no or insufficient data to measure progress, the emerging new data source has the potential to address some important gaps. Thus, this paper presentation shall examine various challenges face by most NSOs in Africa and provide possible way out