Abstract

Background: Ethiopia is the second most populous country of Africa with a total population of about 128 million. Given 60-70% of the population is youth, access and use of digital technology and big data is constrained by a range of factors. This study has aimed at assessing the trajectories of access and utilization of big data.
Methods: The bulk of the information was generated using scooping review of relevant articles and institutional documents. About 17 full text records were used for the review. In addition, data were collected using Key Informant Interview (KIIs) from selected big data generating institutions such as telecom corporation, education and health sectors, and the Central Statistics Authority of Ethiopia. The analytical framework used in this paper was adopted from previous studies on related subjects and addressed three key components of big data access and utilization: behavioural/individual, organizational, technological and external domains.
Results: The analysis indicated that big data access and utilizations are constrained by several variables. Low awareness, poor skills, poor sense of data ownership, and low value given to big data are some of the individual/behavioral constraints. The technical barriers are those related to lack of standardized data acquisition formats, poor network, manual data collection, and lack of continuous supervision. The organizational barriers are something to do with poor commitment, work overload, financial constraints, limited data availability, poor data quality, lack of privacy and security concerns, poor organizational culture in data management…etc. There were also external drivers, among other things, includes poor partnership and collaboration.
Conclusion and implications: Given the challenges enumerated above, it is recommended that the prime data generating organizations should pay more attention to collaboration, partnership, and data sharing. Narrowing down the capacity limitation in data acquisition and analytics, enhance data collection and management methodologies, and enhancement of data privacy and security protocols will create a better environment for big data access and utilization.