Open data can help create more than $3 billion a year of value in seven areas of the global. This is according to African Centre for Statistics Director Oliver Chinganya in who was speaking on behalf of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa at the UN World Data Forum in Cape Town.
Chinganya says open data could provide a number of benefits that would equal financial value for countries and their National Statistics Offices (NSOs).
These benefits include: making cross-departmental sharing easier, less work for NSOs in providing services for the public and the creation of business opportunities for entrepreneurs and the business sector.
“There are two things to consider when talking about openness [of data]: technical openness and legal openness,” says Chinganya.
The African Centre for Statistics Director said that data should be free to use both commercially and publically without restriction.
Chinganya railed against the use of PDFs to publish data by government departments in the African continent, calling this “locking up” data that would hinder the openness of it.
As far as technical openness of data is concerned, Chinganya highlighted that it would have to be machine-readable so that it can be retrieved and read meaningfully. Legally data should be made available for reuse via open licenses.
Chinganya’s statement came ahead of the release of the Africa Data Revolution Report on the last day of the event. The World Wide Web Foundation developed the report.
Tim Berners-Lee is widely known for being the ‘father’ of the World Wide Web that is used to surf the Internet established the Foundation.
South Africa’s Statistician General Pali Lehohla says delegates have been made aware that some countries do better than others in data collection
Another main point that came out of the final day of forum is that $1 billion is needed to make the goal of using data for sustainable development achievable.
“The current aid given to global data and statistical capacity is around 500 million Euro per year which is less than 0.25 percent of global aid given to the world,” says Partnership in Statistics for Development in the 21st Century Manager Johannes Jutting.
He went on to say that if you doubled the aid, to 0.5%, and if the countries doubled their own domestic contributions, one billion Euros would be needed to make the change happen.
The change Jutting was referring to is the change that would come from measuring development as outlined in the UN’s Agenda2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) which succeeded the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).
According to UN Statistics Division director Stephan Schweinfest the Cape Town Action Plan, which was announced towards the end of the Forum, will act as a guiding document for national action plans to measure sustainable development.
Schweinfest says that while there is currently goodwill towards the plan from all countries concerned, follow-ups need to take place between the end of this forum and the second one that will take place in two years’ time.
The UN Data Forum organising committee announced the host city of the next Forum taking place at the end of 2018, beginning of 2019, to be Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
