AfDB partners with Knoema in launching the Open Data for Africa platform

The African Development Bank Group (AfDB), is launching an Open Data for Africa platform. It aims at significantly increasing access to quality data necessary for managing and monitoring development results in African countries, including the Millenium Development Goals. The platform will also serve as a knowledge center for collecting, accessing, and sharing data and data-driven content. The initiative enhances and underpins the AfDB's statistical strategy to improve data collection and dissemination inAfrica, and to promote statistical development on the continent.

The Open Data for Africa platform also responds to a number of important global and regional initiatives to scale up the availability of quality data on Africa and so foster evidence-based decision-making, public accountability, and good governance. The initiative forms part of the worldwide effort to strengthen statistical capacity, articulated in the Busan Action Plan for Statistics, which was endorsed by the international community at the High-level forum on aid effectiveness, which took place in Busan, in South Korea, from November 28 to December 1, 2011.
Open Data for Africa provides users with access to a wide range of development data on Africa managed by the AfDB and other regional and international partners.

It also facilitates the collection, analysis, and sharing of data on emerging and crucial development topics such as food security, gender equality, and climate change. The platform will offer a unique opportunity for AfDB staff, policymakers, analysts, researchers, business leaders, and investors around the world to gain access to reliable and timely data on Africa. Users can visualize socioeconomic indicators over a period of time, utilize presentation-ready graphics or create their own, perform comprehensive analysis at country and regional levels, blog, and share their views and work with others, thereby creating an informed community of users.

As part of its continuing efforts to strengthen statistical systems and promote open access to statistics across the entire continent, the AfDB plans to extend this Open Data platform to all African countries, to create a truly regional data collection, dissemination, and knowledge-sharing system.

The Open Data for Africa platform was launched in partnership with Knoema. This is a knowledge sharing platform and an online community. With a collection of most commonly used global data sets and collection of pre-built charts and tables on various topics, Knoema brings together data-driven content for researchers, policy makers and general public.

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