Background

The African statistical community has globally recognized that producers of official statistics need to transform and modernize themselves to adequately respond to data demands arising from Agenda 2030, Agenda 2063, national development plans, and other agendas and frameworks. 

At the 45th session, the statistical commission voted to establish the UN Committee of Experts on Big Data and Data Science for Official Statistics (UN-CEBD) which created the UN Global Platform and its 4 physical hubs all over the world working together to educate, collaborate and develop new technologies to work with new Big Data sources and methodologies. The 5th International Conference on Big Data for Official Statistics held in Kigali in May 2019, emphasized the importance of Big data in the era of SDGs and the Government of Rwanda offered to host a regional hub of the UN Global Platform for Africa alongside three other Regional hubs in Brazil(Rio de Janeiro), China (Hangzhou) and United Arab Emirates (Dubai). To drive forward and successfully implement this undertaking, ECA, NISR, and UN signed an MoU in March 2020 to operationalize the Regional Hub.

Mission and objectives

The mission of the Hub is to support Member States in effectively using alternative data sources, applying appropriate data science tools and techniques for their use in providing credible and insightful statistics.

Objectives:

    1) Facilitation of projects in the use of Big Data and data science for official statistics and SDG indicators.

    2) Sharing of knowledge on newly developed methods, algorithms and tool

    3) Provision of training in the use of Big Data and data science for the community of official statisticians and data              scientists in Africa.

Activities

Advocacy and Leadership: Promoting use cases and applications while sharing the benefits to be gained, thus supporting Big Data and data science activities within the wider National Statistical System.

Capacity-building: training activities in the form of webinars, seminars, face-to-face training, hackathons and workshops on data science for the modernisation of official statistics.

Research: on the use of big data, alternative data sources, and data science for the development of new statistical methods and techniques.

United National Global Platform(UNGP): Further development and maintenance of the Platform to facilitate collaboration projects, and enable knowledge exchange on newly developed methods, algorithms, and tools.

Organizational Structure

The following governance structure will ensure the implementation of the Strategic Plan and overarching Memorandum of Understanding.

Background Documents

TORs of the Regional Hub

Strategic Plan of the Regional Hub 

The governance structure of the Regional Hub