By MARCELO GIUGALE :
How would you feel if you were on an airplane and the pilot made the
following announcement: “This is your captain speaking. I’m happy to
report that we have just climbed to 36,000 feet and will soon reach
our cruising speed….I think.
You see, the airline has not invested enough in our flight instruments
over the past 40 years. Some of them are obsolete and most are
inaccurate. So, to be honest with you, I’m not sure how good the
engines really are. And I can only estimate our altitude, speed and
location. Apart from that, sit back, relax and enjoy the ride.”
This is, in a nutshell, the story of statistics in Africa. Fuelled by
its many natural resources, the region is growing fast, is finally
beginning to reduce poverty, and seems headed for success. Or so we
think, for there are major problems with its data, problems that call
for urgent, game-changing action.
First, we don’t really know how big many African economies are. In
about half of them, the system of “national accounts” dates back to
1968; in the other half, it is from 1993. This means that measuring
things like how much is produced, consumed or invested is done with
methods from the times when computers were rare and the Internet did
not exist.
The methodology ignores the fact that some industries have disappeared
and new ones were born. How badly does this skew the data? Well, to
give you an idea, when Ghana used a newer methodology to update its
accounts in 2010, it found out that its economy was about 60 per cent
bigger than it had previously thought — and the country instantly
became “middle-income” in the global ranking.
Second, the latest poverty counts for Africa are, on average,
five-year-old. So we only have guesstimates of how the global
financial, food and fuel crises have impacted the distribution of
income, wealth and opportunities in the region.
This is because, to count the poor, you need “household surveys” —
those face-to-face, home visits where people are asked how much they
earn, own, know and so on. Only 15 African countries have done these
surveys since 2000. And how about the good old “census” — that
once-in-a-while count of a country’s entire population?
Censuses are the only time when we learn how many we are, how fast we
are aging, where we live, how we live and lots of other information
that helps governments make smart(er) decisions on things like health
care, school construction or crime prevention.
Experts say that you should have a census every 10 years. Sixteen
African countries have fallen behind that tempo — which means that, at
the moment, we don’t know much about a third of those who live in the
region.
How does one even start tackling a problem like that? The truth is
that a lot of money has been invested in improving Africa’s
statistics. Most of that money came as donations from well-meaning
rich countries, and went to fund “institutional development”, that is,
to train and equip national statistics offices.
According to the “Partnership in Statistics for Development in the
21st Century” (a.k.a. “PARIS21”), between 2009 and 2011 alone, Africa
received $700 million to build up its capacity to collect data. That
led to some progress, but dismally short of what is needed. Why?
Mostly politics. Solution? A mix of democracy and technology.
It is much more difficult to mess with a country’s statistics when
people are free to complain about it. Democratisation has brought a
new appetite for information to the average African citizen, much of
it expressed through a data-hungry media.
The number of recalcitrant governments that gather data but refuse to
release it, or release it when it is obsolete-late, is falling—slowly
but surely. And the legal walls that protect public statisticians from
meddling politicians are hardening—Senegal pioneered the trend in the
early 2000s.
This is good, because national statistics offices are like central
banks: once you recruit the best technicians, you want to step back
and let them do their job.
But what will really revolutionise African statistics is communication
technology. The continent is embracing cellular telephony with gusto;
it is only a question of time before its people can become regular
respondents in censuses and surveys.
Satellite imagery can now be used to literally see and gauge, from
outer space, economic activity in ports, highways and markets. And
tracking what people do, search or talk about on the web — their “data
exhaust” — gives you a sense of what they are up to as workers,
consumers and investors.
All of this is yet to be deployed in Africa. To fix its data problem,
the region should not just bring up to par the statistical systems it
currently has; it may also want to leapfrog into tomorrow’s systems.