Abstract

This paper advocates the use of new data sources in Africa’s official
statistics due to the enormous advantages it has over traditional statistics. It
for instance, provides a rich potential source to complement the
production of government official statistics, with the benefit that they are
often more timely and detailed than traditional statistics. They also
provide strategic insights unlike the traditional sources, additionally,
they uncover hidden trends and patterns often missed by standard data
analysis. Traditional data sources are structured data that have been used
by organizations including official statistics for decades in Africa.  In
this era of big data that deals with large, complex, and rapidly growing
data sets that are difficult to process using traditional software, it is
imperative to embrace new data sources for official statistics in order to
improve the quality of decisions. In Africa, the use of new data sources
suffer from many debilitating challenges including lack of requisite
equipment, infrastructural deficit and trained manpower that can
handle large volumes of unstructured information that come from new
technologies. This situation may cast doubt on the reliability and
integrity of data produced and may erode public trust in the resultant
information. To institutionalize the adoption of new data sources by
African countries and at the same time maintain public trust in its output,
it is imperative to build the continent’s capacity in this regard. This
presentation therefore examines public trust issues emanating from data
collection and processing procedures and links it to weak official statistic’s
capacity in policies, systems, equipment, infrastructure and manpower in
Africa.