Data-driven economy and orientation: A necessity for development

In most African countries like Nigeria, individuals are typically born, grow, live through adulthood, retire, age, and die without the government’s knowing or being aware of their existence. This happens more in the remote villages and more within the informal sector and within the unbanked population. Noticeably, due to lack of political will, successive governments and heads of nations in these African countries have ignored the lingering need for a data management system to improve the political, societal, and economic development landscape. Big data analytics has been the technology drive that many nations of the world are adopting for improved governance, Africa should not be an exception.

A clear instance in recent time was in Nigeria, the biggest economy in Africa, where millions of the citizens were expectant on palliative care from the government but due to logistics and lack of national data bank, it was difficult to achieve a seamless reach to the citizenries. The distribution could have been more effective with an efficient database and social welfare systems instead of the eventual looting of the stored palliative items that ensued. Social welfare protection is key to provide citizens with an economic safety net during periods of illness, economic hardship.

Records indicated that the social welfare system in the form of insurance and assistance programmes to the public, emerged in Europe in the 1800s to majorly support the vulnerable and it has been driven largely by adequate data management. This is the 21st century, yet Africa is still struggling with a data-driven economy. It is significant to state that most of the major decision-making or policies in western countries from the USA, Canada, Australia, and most European countries, these days are largely data-driven. For instance, the Canadian government announced COVID-19 aid in the form of a one-time payment of up to $500 for eligible seniors to offset any increased living expenses they have incurred as a result of the pandemic. In the same vein, such government supports and economic stimuli are applicable in the USA and the UK to save jobs, businesses and to minimize the economic impacts of the pandemic. In Africa, it has been a difficult task and the issue has been mainly due to the lack of adequate citizen information, thereby increasing economic hardship and poverty.

Consequently, a national database is vital, it would provide insights into population demographics, unemployment rate, age distributions, births, deaths, mortality, marriages, and infrastructure gaps. It can also help in developing the right targeted policies to fix or alleviate, social issues such as corruption, inequality between the wealthy and poor, level of education, and rate of unemployment among others. Under international human rights law, Nigeria’s government has an obligation to protect people’s rights and to ensure a meaningful standard of living, including adequate food and nutrition, the highest attainable standard of health, and the right to social security. To conveniently achieve this all-important mission, agreeably a national database is required. In addition, to address the obligations especially the unemployment rate distribution across the country especially can be addressed, the National database is key and can help in a lot of national planning.

The process of capturing and storing citizen information backed with a data protection Bill in the National Assemblies is highly desirable and seemingly necessary, particularly in Nigeria. This national database can be used for so many verifiable and evidence-based statistics, evaluations, and a lot of inferences can be derived from it. At this point, Post COVID-19 has presented an opportunity, which is the creation of a national database in these African countries. It is highly desirable and the benefits outweigh the costs meaningfully. When a national database is in place it can be accessed, analyzed and contact tracing can be made a lot easier. Agreeably, it can help in a variety of other ways, such as public service improvement, designing of policies, public health development, public safety, national security, national development, and poverty reduction. It can also help in developing empirically-proven techniques for fostering human and capital development. No nation attains sustainable economic growth without developing a national database necessary to drive such growth. The national database methodology is a less expensive option to performing a physical census because it is a register-based census.

So far, the year 2020 has been filled with disruptions due to the novel coronavirus (COVID-19). Despite COVID-19 being a health issue, has continued to have a high-impact and severity on the economy, business, and lifestyle globally. It continues to reshape the ways of doing things and high disruptions across the remains across all sectors and countries. For a developing country like Nigeria and as obtainable in most African countries, the disruption