A smallholder farmer displays a newly harvested bunch of rice from her
farm in Morogoro. The long awaited Tanzania Agricultural Bank is
expected to help smallholder farmers increase farm productivity. PHOTO |
FILE
By GEORGINA ALEXANDER and JOHN ENDRES
In Summary
- The World Bank’s Bulletin Board on Statistical Capacity shows that only 16 African countries scored above 70 for statistical capacity
Can we really trust statistics on Africa? Often,
the answer is “no”. The debate about the Africa rising story is
unlikely to be settled anytime soon because the numbers do not provide
an accurate picture.
Nigeria’s GDP in 2012 was given as $268.7 billion.
In 2013 it almost doubled to $522.6 billion and Nigeria has displaced
South Africa as the continent’s largest economy. Did Nigeria’s economy
double overnight?
Clearly not. Instead, the country’s statistics
agency updated its GDP calculations. Governments should make these
“rebasing” adjustments every five years, but Nigeria let 24 years
elapse.
Entire industries excluded from the old
calculations, such as the booming film and mobile telephone businesses,
have now been included, providing a more accurate impression of the size
of Nigeria’s economy.
Warning for numbers
This story serves as a warning for many of the
numbers on Africa. The two most basic statistics about any country are
how many people it has and the size of its economy. Without these two
numbers it is impossible to calculate an accurate income per capita or a
proper understanding of poverty.
Yet, according to the 2014 Africa Survey, released
today by Good Governance Africa, 17 African countries have not
conducted a census in the past decade.
Five African countries have not conducted a
census in over 20 years: Western Sahara (44 years), the Democratic
Republic of Congo and Eritrea (30), Somalia (27) and Madagascar (21).
The World Bank’s Bulletin Board on Statistical
Capacity shows that only 16 African countries scored above 70 for
statistical capacity, a measure of the competence of national
statistical systems based on criteria consistent with international
recommendations. Scores range from 0 to 100 (best). Egypt achieved the
highest statistical capacity score at 90. Eleven countries scored under
50 with Somalia scoring the lowest in Africa at 24.
Various flaws bedevil African statistics. The
figures may be out of date, as is the case with population information
on the Democratic Republic of Congo, where the last census was conducted
in 1984. Or old numbers may have been brought up to date by a process
of extrapolation, with decreasing reliability as the length of the
forecast increases. Should we believe the United Nations’ assertion that
the total fertility rate for Africa will be 2.18 in the year 2100, 86
years from now?
Other statistics are distorted, unwittingly or
intentionally, by the agencies gathering them. Is Ethiopia’s economy
really growing at just under 10 per cent per year, a figure that Western
media have called “dubious” and “fanciful”?
Many of us are aware of these shortcomings. But we
continue to use these numbers because they are the only ones we have.
And although the margin of inaccuracy may be great, we expect that the
trends shown by the numbers are often accurate. It is likely true that
many Africans are starting to move out of poverty and reaching for the
first rungs of the ladder to the middle class.
This is attracting investors who are beginning to see the
untapped demand. Over time this commercial interest will improve the
quality of the numbers as companies and governments begin investing in
better data.
There is an increasing awareness that governments
cannot make policy without good numbers. International donors and
African governments have been dedicating more resources and attention to
statistics since the late 1990s, to which several collaborations bear
witness: the 1999 Paris21 initiative, the Marrakech Action Plan for
Statistics, the UN-backed Reference Regional Strategic Framework for
Statistical Capacity Building in Africa, the African Union’s African
Charter on Statistics, as well as other programmes and individual
countries’ efforts.
We hope that these initiatives amount to more than
just talk. Better data makes for better governance. It improves the
allocation of resources, while gathering data focuses attention on the
situation being analysed. Comparisons over time or across administrative
units show where progress is being made and where more attention needs
to be focused. Decision makers need reliable statistics to make good
policy, and Africa deserves better numbers.
This article was first published by Africa
Check, a non-profit fact-checking organisation (@AfricaCheck). Georgina
Alexander is a researcher at Good Governance Africa. John Endres is the
CEO of Good Governance Africa, a research and advocacy organisation
established in 2012
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