Welcome!

Welcome to the first edition of the UN Regional Hub for Big Data and Data Science for Africa’s Newsletter. This publication is designed to keep you informed about the latest developments, insights, and opportunities to support modernising official statistics through the use of big data and data science. We aim to bring you exciting data science news from across Africa, and signpost training and project opportunities of interest.

Who are we?

The UN Regional Hub for Big Data and Data Science for Africa (The Hub) is a collaboration between the National Institute of Rwanda (NISR) and the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (ECA).  The Hub’s mission is to support African member States in effectively using alternative data sources and applying data science tools and techniques for their use in providing credible and insightful statistics. The Hub aims to achieve this by:

1. Sharing knowledge on newly developed methods, algorithms and tools, via the Hub’s communication channels 
2. Facilitating cross-border collaboration of projects that seek to apply big data, alternative data sources, and data science, for official statistics and to fill data gaps for SDG indicators
3. Providing training in the use of big data and data science for the community of official statisticians in Africa. 

New Funding gives green light to Mobile Phone Data projects across Africa

The UN Task Team on Mobile Phone Data (MPD) is moving from developing methodological guides and Handbooks to the implementation of MPD projects. Some of you may recall webinars delivered by the MPD Task Team during 2024 that promoted some of the Guides – the recordings from those webinars are available here.

Funding has been provided via the Global Data Facility window on MPD, to work with the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and the World Bank, as part of a project cohort that aims to implement MPD for policy. 
 

👏 Congratulations to the NSOs of Benin, Cote D’Ivoire, The Gambia, Guinea, Kenya, Morocco, Rwanda, Senegal, Togo, and Tunisia on being selected to form part of this funded cohort. We may be inviting you to a webinar or request a Blog post from you in the near future!

For more information about the workshops that were held, the project, plus to view a recap video, please follow the link here.

Join our Data Science Champions Network for Africa

The Hub, along with its partners and stakeholders, invites you to join our new Data Science Champions network for Official Statistics across Africa. Through this network we aim to create a community that inspires and supports every National Statistics Office (NSO) on their data science journey.  For more information on what the network offers and the Terms of Reference please see here. 

If you would like to apply to become a Data Science Champion or Data Science Practitioner, please email us at regionalhubforafrica@un.org. 

 Webinar Programme 2025

The Hub is tasked to provide a knowledge exchange platform for African NSOs and others, to share information of experimental research and applications using alternative data, methods, and tools. It provides a means for the promotion and discussion of new product launches, and to signpost publicly available code, guidance and learning materials. The Hub's Webinar Programme is under continuous development, but details of up-coming webinars can be found here. 

Planned Webinars Quarter 1:

• Tue, 21 Jan; 17:00–18:00 EAT: UN Task Team on Scanner Data present an overview of their survey on systems architecture and signpost available learning.
• Thu, 20 Feb; time: 14:00-15:00 EAT: The UK Data Science Campus and UNECA present a new R-pipeline for Civil Registration and Vital Statistics and share the code.

Contact us!

If you would like to share your data science news with us, become a member of the Data Science Champions Network, or discuss anything related to data science with us, please get in touch.

   regionalhubforafrica@un.org 

 https://ecastats.uneca.org/regionalhub