The African Development Bank (AfDB), as the premier developmental organization in the continent, supports its 54 regional member countries to reduce levels of poverty and boost economic and social progress. Reliable and timely data are vital not only for formulating the AfDB’s own strategies, and for monitoring the outcomes of its programs and projects, but also for all those who wish to ensure the continent’s future positive growth trajectory. This includes key policymakers in African countries, central banks and non-governmental organizations, subregional and regional organizations, UN agencies, multinational organizations, as well as external donors and investors.
The Bank undertook technical assistance missions to six countries in February 2014: Morocco, Nigeria, Mauritius, Rwanda, Tunisia and Zambia
02/28/2014
The Bank undertook technical assistance missions jointly with the IMF Statistics Department in 6 pilot countries. The purpose of the missions was to introduce staff of the central banks and the national statistical offices to using the Open Data Platform (ODP), which is a tool for data collaboration and dissemination that has been made available to countries under the statistical capacity building program of the Bank. The ODP offers a rich data dissemination platform that greatly facilitates the web-dissemination of data by agencies using it. The ODP supports the dissemination of data using the Statistical Data and Metadata eXchange (SDMX) standards. SDMX is an initiative sponsored by seven international organizations to foster standards for the exchange of statistical information and is a key component of providing open access to data. The ODP supports streamlined and automated data transmission processes, and a platform to enhance the sharing of data within a country and for the web-dissemination of publicly available data. The ODP and SDMX has been adopted for streamlining countries’ reporting to the Bank and the IMF.
Currently, RMCs’ national statistical offices receive many requests for data from international organizations that all need the information in different formats. At the same time, there is an increased appetite for official statistics from policy makers, private sector, researchers, civil society, non-governmental organizations, the media, and the general public. National statistical offices seeking to meet all these demands in a timely fashion are often engaged in repetitive and time-consuming tasks, which are costly in terms of manpower and finances. The AfDB’s Open Data Platform addresses this challenge in a very effective way. National statistical offices only need to upload data once onto the Open Data Platform using common SDMX standards and formats already agreed upon by all stakeholders. The data so reported in the AfDB’s Open Data Platform is then made available to users in real time. This significantly reduces the data-reporting burden for countries
