By Timi Olubiyi, PhD

In most African countries like Nigeria, individuals are typically born, grow, live through adulthood, retire, aged, and die without the government’s knowing or being aware of their existence.

This happens more in the remote villages and more within the informal sector and within the unbanked population.

Noticeably, due to lack of political will, successive governments and heads of nations in these African countries have ignored the lingering need for a data management system to improve the political, societal, and economic development landscape.

Big data analytics has been the technology drive that many nations of the world are adopting for improved governance, Africa should not be an exception.

A clear instance in recent time was in Nigeria, the biggest economy in Africa, where millions of the citizens were expectant on palliative care from the government but due to logistics and lack of national data bank, it was difficult to achieve a seamless reach to the citizenries.

The distribution could have been more effective with an efficient database and social welfare systems instead of the eventual looting of the stored palliative items that ensued. Social welfare protection is key to provide citizens with an economic safety net during periods of illness, and economic hardship.

Records indicated that the social welfare system in the form of insurance and assistance programmes to the public emerged in Europe in the 1800s to majorly support the vulnerable and it has been driven largely by adequate data management.

This is the 21st century, yet Africa is still struggling with a data-driven economy. It is significant to state that most of the major decision-making or policies in western countries from the USA, Canada, Australia, and most European countries, these days are largely data-driven.

For instance, the Canadian government announced COVID-19 aid in the form of a one-time payment of up to $500 for eligible seniors to offset any increased living expenses they have incurred as a result of the pandemic.

In the same vein, such government supports and economic stimuli are applicable in the USA and the UK to save jobs, businesses and to minimize the economic impacts of the pandemic.

In Africa, it has been a difficult task and the issue has been mainly due to the lack of adequate citizen information, thereby increasing economic hardship and poverty.

Consequently, a national database is vital, it would provide insights into population demographics, unemployment rate, age distributions, births, deaths, mortality, marriages, and infrastructure gaps.

It can also help in developing the right targeted policies to fix or alleviate social issues such as corruption, inequality between the wealthy and poor, level of education and rate of unemployment among others.

Under international human rights law, Nigeria’s government has an obligation to protect people’s rights and to ensure a meaningful standard of living, including adequate food and nutrition, the highest attainable standard of health, and the right to social security.

To conveniently achieve this all-important mission, agreeably a national database is required.

In addition, to address the obligations especially the unemployment rate distribution across the country especially can be addressed, the national database is key and can help in a lot of national planning.

The process of capturing and storing citizen information backed with a data protection bill in the National Assemblies is highly desirable and seemingly necessary, particularly in Nigeria.

This national database can be used for so many verifiable and evidence-based statistics, evaluations, and a lot of inferences can be derived from it.

At this point, post-COVID-19 has presented an opportunity, which is the creation of a national database in these African countries. It is highly desirable and the benefits outweigh the costs meaningfully.

When a national database is in place it can be accessed, analysed and contact tracing can be made a lot easier. Agreeably, it can help in a variety of other ways, such as public service improvement, designing of policies, public health development, public safety, national security, national development, and poverty reduction.

It can also help in developing empirically-proven techniques for fostering human and capital development. No nation attains sustainable economic growth without developing a national database necessary to drive such growth. The national database methodology is a less expensive option to performing a physical census because it is a register-based census.

So far, the year 2020 has been filled with disruptions due to the novel coronavirus (COVID-19). Despite COVID-19 being a health issue, has continued to have a high-impact and severity on the economy, business, and lifestyle globally.

It continues to reshape the ways of doing things and high disruptions across the remains across all sectors and countries.

For a developing country like Nigeria and as obtainable in most African countries, the disruption level is higher, stern with fragile economies across the continent.

The majority of the African populace lacks a reliable social welfare system; therefore, the socio-economic impact of the COVID-19 has been more severe on the continent.

It is, therefore, recommended that concrete policy adoption be considered for the management of national emergencies, humanitarian responses, reduction of the impact of the current pandemic, and the attendant looming economic recession.

Returning to business of lack of a strong data management culture and lack of sound data for governance Post COVID-19 will only further retrogress the continent’s development and living of the over 1.2 billion population. In fact, solutions to social and economic problems are often inseparable from the data

Broadly speaking with COVID-19, the number of incidences keeps increasing, consequently, flattening the curve or having a drop in the reported cases is still a mirage at least for now mainly because of lack of effective data-driven decisions.

Therefore, measures to preserve the livelihoods of workers and businesses and ensure they get by conveniently during this period are vital. This is supported by the World Bank’s stipulation in their 2005 report, which recommends that countries should design, finance, and deliver social welfare accordingly with a data management system.

The methodology to adopt as part of the post-COVID-19 recovery policy and national development is for the countries to introduce a data-driven economy and effective national data management platform. In my opinion, data is a developmental infrastructure that can provide critical insights into the trend of human actions, practices, behaviours, and social impacts.

The government cannot improve on school infrastructures without adequately knowing how many children need to be enrolled. Therefore, when citizen data management is properly earnest, it holds tremendous potential to stimulate economic growth and measurable development.

In light of the many African nation’s desire for accelerated economic growth particularly Nigeria, a national database is necessary as part of the post-COVID-19 policy priority.

Nevertheless, if it is open, integrated, unified, and harmonized amongst all the tires of government it will be an enabler for transparency and accountability, as well as reduce crime and criminality in Africa.

A low number of African countries including South Africa, Namibia, Mauritius, and Lesotho have some form of social package much can still be achieved in education and health which are two widely acclaimed barometers used to measure economic growth.

The citizenry should be catered for especially the vulnerable, through an adequate social welfare system. The COVID-19 experience exposed this inadequacy in Africa and this can be corrected easily by initiating and achieving an acceptable national database in each country.

From adequately capturing birth registration, education enrolments, adulthood, citizens in diaspora, retirees, to the closure by death registration, the citizenry must be known, captured, and catered for adequately in Africa.

Nonetheless, the COVID-19 relief programs across Africa just go to show how far behind the continent is with the data-driven economy and national database development, especially in Nigeria. The vast majority of people in Africa are most vulnerable according to context observation, and many of the countries are still grappling to protect their citizens from the negative impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

That said, the fertility rate in Nigeria is very high with a population forecast of 400m by 2050 according to reliable data from Worldometer.

Tackling poverty in the land and reducing the high rate of unemployment has only received low attention by the successive government based on historical trends. With a national database in place, enactment of specific, and targeted policies to improve the lives of its citizens and its economy can be easily achieved.

Recall, the Minister of Humanitarian Affairs, Disaster Management, and Social Development in Nigeria, Ms Sadiya Farouq, expressed recently that her Ministry was tasked with the responsibility to address some of the underlying causes, drivers, and consequences of humanitarian crises and underdevelopment including COVID-19 impact management in the country.

She said this included the management of the relatively high level of poverty nearly half (90 million) of the country’s 200 million population.

Further to this, the President of the country, Rtd General Muhammadu Buhari, directed the Humanitarian Affairs Ministry to also develop a strategy to maintain the school feeding social program during the lockdown.

These tasks have been difficult to achieve in Nigeria, especially with identifying and reaching out to the very vulnerable citizens amongst the over 200m populace.

One of the significant reasons has been due to the high variety of datasets and the lack of a reliable, verifiable, harmonized, and efficient national database.

In Nigeria, many government institutions and agencies generate populace personal data daily. This includes: (i). Federal Road Safety Commission (FRSC), responsible for drivers’ license and vehicle number plates; (ii). Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), responsible for voters registration exercise; (iii). National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), responsible for the production of national official statistics; (iv). National Identity Management Commission (NIMC), which is responsible for the national identity database; (v). National Population Commission (NPC), in charge of national demographic data; (vi). Other organizations including the banks in the financial sector and telecommunication companies in the telecommunication sector such as MTN, 9mobile, Globacom, Airtel, etc.

Most of the data collected by these agencies are structured in nature but the big issue is that the data remain unharmonized with no centralized platform. Citizens are made to provide the same information at different times to different agencies causing lots of time wastages and duplications.

Though according to records, the existing Bank Verification Number (BVN) database in Nigeria has captured just about 25 per cent of the population, which are largely citizens with bank accounts, leaving a large chunk of the population who are unbanked.

Besides, only 42 million of the 200 million population are also captured in the country’s National Identity Database, the National Identity Management Commission (NIMC), according to the Director-General of NIMC, Aliyu Aziz.

The DG further asserts that the enrolment of people into the National identity Database, the commission was only able to successfully harmonize 14 million BVNs with National Identity Numbers (NIN) nationwide.

Consequently, a broader, consolidated, and harmonized national data management platform is necessary, which should be in line with the global best practice of data management devoid of any preference. Such a national database can also benefit from periodic reviews and research to guarantee relevance, reliability, and utility at any time.

Significant to note, most of the development and decisions in the world economies are data-driven, the pandemic has presented an opportunity to the public sectors in Africa and Nigeria, in particular, to embrace technology and data management system to aid national planning effectively.

With no enough infrastructures to manage the level of population growth in Africa, the infrastructures are likely to be overstretched without a reliable data-driven decision-making system, projections, and technological development.

The effect of the lack of this key decision-making tool is unimaginable, and the continued suffering of the majority of the population in Africa is likely to continue without it. Hence, with a good grasp of the relevant citizen data, demographics, and information, governments in Africa will be in an excellent position to drive a digital economy, achieve citizen engagements easily and also formulate enabling developmental policies that will improve e-govenance. They will also be able to measure the impact of these policies and also get aids when required from agencies like The World Bank (WB), The UK Department for International Development (DFID), The United States Agency for International Development (USAID), World Trade Organization (WTO), World Health Organization (WHO), International Monetary Fund (IMF), United Nation(UN) and its agencies among others.

The Nigerian government and other African governments need to consider the establishment of a specialized agency “Big Data Management Authority” saddled with the responsibility of implementing the framework discussed in this piece and much more. Good luck!

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Dr Timi Olubiyi is an Entrepreneurship and Small Business Management expert with a PhD in Business Administration. He is a prolific investment coach, business engineer, Chartered Member of the Chartered Institute for Securities & Investment (CISI), and a financial literacy specialist. He can be reached on the Twitter handle @drtimiolubiyi and via email: [email protected], for any questions, reactions, and comments.