Big Data and Data Science Training

The Regional Hub for Africa aims to use this page to keep the African data science community informed of up-coming training courses, as well as to share already established (reputable) training courses, and signpost the tools and frameworks that are available to support an individual's continuous professional development.

Please ensure that you have discussed your learning requirements with your manager and that you have the appropriate approvals in place prior to undertaking any new training.

Available (Reputable) Training and Mentoring programmes

• UN Learning Management System – holds free (short) online Big Data courses, developed by the various UN-CEBD Task Teams on Big Data. More free online courses are due to be added soon. You need to register first (free) before accessing the courses.
• UNSIAP Learning Management System (ESCAP) – holds facilitated e-learning and self-paced e-learning courses. You need to register first (free) before accessing the courses.
• International Data Masterclass – Available on the UN Learning Management System (online and free). The International Data Masterclass has been designed to help non-analytical senior leaders across world-wide governments to put data and evidence at the heart of their decision-making.
• International Data Science Accelerator (Mentoring) Programme - is a short-term virtual mentoring programme involving mentors and mentees from global National Statistics Offices and international organisations. The programme is project focused and it prioritises National Statistical Offices (NSOs) in low and middle-income countries who are looking at developing their data science capability.  Mentee applicants need to identify a small project within their business area that may be solved using non-traditional data sources or new data science tools and techniques. If you are interested in applying, please contact the Data Science Campus at ONS for more information via International.data.science.accelerator.programme@ons.gov.uk

Big Data Training Catalogue

The UN Task Team on Training, Competencies and Capacity Development has developed the UN Big Data Training Catalogue. This can be used to:

• Search its (global) training database for available training courses (not all are free)
• Create your own Learning Pathway that outlines your personal development and training needs
• Peruse the Big Data Competency Framework to consider the knowledge, skills and attributes required to work with Big Data
• Apply the Big Data Maturity Matrix to your Big Data project to understand the gaps and how to fill them (this is due to be updated to V2.0 soon)

Resources

Alternative Data Sources for Price Statistics

With thanks to our colleagues at UN ESCAP for sharing these resources to support NSOs who are modernising their CPI

• Alternative data sources for price statistics : Uzbekistan’s experience modernizing the Consumer Price Index | ESCAP
• Web scraping for CPI: Learning Resources - Web Scraping Knowledge Products - Statistics Division's Community of Practices
• Web Scraping for the CPI: Learning Resources on Reproducible Analytical Pipelines (RAP) – ESCAP learning resources on RAP

New Training announcements

New training announcements will be made here.