AFDB launches Africa’s Information Highway

The African Development Bank (AfDB) has launched an ambitious program to significantly improve data management and dissemination in Africa. The ultimate goal of the program is to facilitate wider public access to official statistics and to support countries in their efforts to improve data quality and dissemination for better policy formulation, monitoring and evaluation. The program was launched in November 2012 as part of the Bank’s broader statistical capacity building program in Africa. Work has been going on concurrently in several African countries and insti- tutions and has been completed in the following 13 countries and one PanAfrican institution: Cape Verde, Democratic Republic of Congo, Cameroon, Congo, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Rwanda, South Sudan, Tanzania, Tunisia, Zimbabwe, Zambia and the African Union Commission. The plan is to finalize the development and installation of data portals in all 54 African countries and 16 sub-regional and regional agencies by the end of July 2013.

The program involves the development and installation of common IT platforms in all 54 countries and 16 sub-regional and regional organiza- tions in Africa. The aim is to establish live data links between the Bank and National Statistical Agencies, Central Banks and Line Ministries in African countries, on one hand, and linking the countries with each other and with other external development partners, on the other. This will facilitate easy data exchange, validation, analysis and dissemination using common international standards and guidelines. This approach will not only ease access to statistical data and metadata in African countries, it will also help to improve the quality of the country data by making it more internationally comparable, harmonized, meaningful, and ultimately more usable.