Abstract

This paper advocates the use of the 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.