Counting on Data to Manage Africa's Resources and Deliver on UN Sustainable Development Goals

Africa’s development in the 21^st century will largely depend on her ability to conserve and manage her resources efficiently and effectively. To achieve this, it is essential for African countries to reexamine their existing data infrastructure and strive to produce quality, disaggregated and actionable data for intended targets. Open data provides a unique opportunity for African countries to reinvent their data infrastructure and help eliminate the current asymmetry of data supply and demand in the policy arena. There have been substantial benefits in the few instances where open data procedures have been adopted by development planners and stakeholders in the continent—particularly in food crop research, where information disseminated from the research has helped yield tremendous value in nutrition and provided an overall boost to regional economies. The new UN Sustainable Development Goals provide a unique opportunity for African governments to continue to pursue open data policies both within individual countries and in the regional space. This flash talk will focus on the options to promote data sharing and dissemination to better harness Africa's resources for development.