Data Mosaic Africa: Bridging the Gap for a Data-Driven African Future.
A 2017 issue of The Economist argued quite convincingly that the world’s most valuable resource is no longer oil, but data 1. The accompanying image had a couple of rather corporate-looking oil platforms with labels indicating that the major operators were private entities. A class of important operators that was conspicuously omitted was government institutions. Across the world, government institutions are increasingly relying on data-driven approaches to justify policy initiatives.
To ensure transparency and objectivity in our increased reliance on data especially in the context of governance and civic participation, it is important that we think of data (our new oil) as a public good, whose extraction and processing should not only involve but enrich the lives of people.
Due to a slower pace of digitalization among other factors, the African continent faces particular challenges in transitioning fully to a data-driven approach to decision making.
At Data Mosaic Africa, we are driven by the conviction that the only way to ensure a transparent, objective reliance on data for governance and public policy is to increase citizen participation in the processes that shape the collection, management, and interpretation of data on the African continent.
That is why it is our mission to use data to speak objectively about Africa’s problems, promise and progress, in a way that encourages participation through the identification of data sources and education through demonstration of how to objectively make meaning of our data.
Just as oil is a public good, and it is to be expected that the location of oil fields is knowledge in the public domain, and the extraction of value from this resource is beneficial to the public at large, we at Data Mosaic Africa imagine an Africa in which obtaining public data is as easy as looking up a city in a map, and the knowledge and expertise to make meaning of this data - especially as concerns its relation to problems, promise and challenges - are easily accessible to the interested citizen.
As a non-profit, non-governmental organization, our independence and impartiality are sacrosanct, and we strive to always be objective in the manner in which we carry ourselves. We rely on grants and donations to cover our operational costs.
If you like the work we do and would like to support us, please write to us at contact@datamosaic.org. Your support will be ensuring that we transform Africa into a data-driven continent.
Footnotes
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2017/05/06/the-worlds-most-valuable-resource-is-no-longer-oil-but-data↩︎