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Chapter 8. New Data Approaches for Monitoring SustainableDevelopment Progress: The Case of AfricaThis chapter covers new data approaches for monitoringsustainable development progress, by focusing on Africa, acontinent that has been continuously challenged in theproduction and use of data in support of its developmentefforts. An analysis of MDG data availability in Africaprovides a clear snapshot of the issues that the datarevolution should address. Only three African countrieshave data on all MDG indicators. 775 Even when data isavailable, its frequency is low for some indicators.Although about three-quarters of African countries havesome data on extreme poverty since 1990, these data isavailable on average only every ten years in the period1990-2012. 776 This is clearly insufficient to address the dataneeds of policy makers. For sustainable developmentindicators, there have been calls to have data availableannually. 777 To address crisis and rapidly evolvingsituations, higher frequency data may be needed.Innovations can assist in many ways. They can automatetedious tasks and thus free up human resources for morechallenging work. Innovations can make data more relevantby increasing its timeliness, its quality and its availabilitywhile cutting costs. The focus of the chapter is oninnovative approaches in generating, collecting, analysingand using data which can be useful to monitor sustainabledevelopment progress and that can provide benefitscompared to traditional data approaches. Here, anapproach is considered innovative if it is recent or still onlyused by a small number of countries.Senegal 782 and S. Tomé and Principe. Non-governmentalorganizations are also investing in this technology. Oxfamhas been conducting surveys using Android smartphoneson people’s knowledge of symptoms of Ebola and how toprevent the disease in Gambia, Guinea Bissau and Senegal.These surveys use the Mobenzi app, 783 which has beendeveloped by a South African company.By using mobile devices, preliminary results of the 2013census in Senegal were available in just three months asopposed to one year in previous censuses. For an HIVsurvey conducted in Botswana in 2013, 784 the time torelease the results was reduced by six months. Apart fromreducing time, the use of mobile devices is paper smart andreduces costs by eliminating printing, transportation andstorage of questionnaires. It also eliminates the cost ofentering the data recorded on paper into a digital form,since with mobile devices the data is directly transmitted tocentral servers. For instance, for a large sample survey ofabout 13,000 households the resulting cost saving has beenestimated at about US$200,000. 785 Two other beneficialfeatures of using mobile devices for census/survey datacollection is the less propensity of data entry errors(because there is one less step in data transcription, a lot oferrors come from data entry from paper to digital formats);and the possibility of doing quick data validations –both inthe field and in headquarters– that allow enumerators tore-visit the household before leaving the area to correctany inconsistencies.8.1. New technologies for data collection8.1.1. Face-to-face data collection with mobile devicesOne of the major issues for large scale and complex datacollection operations, such as censuses and surveys, is thetime lag between data collection and the release of theresults. The use of handheld mobile devices in datacollection has reduced that time lag. In Africa, they wereused initially by researchers and NGOs, in countries likeMozambique, 778 Tanzania and Burkina Faso, but mobilehandheld devices have started to be used in official datacollections in recent years. Mozambique used mobiledevices in its agricultural census as far back as 2009. 779Cape Verde was the first country in Africa to use mobiledevices with geo-positioning for data collection in apopulation census in 2010, 780 but since then thetechnology has expanded to official surveys and censuses inother countries, including Botswana, 781 Côte d’Ivoire,153Box 8-1. Innovative data collection, integration anddissemination in NigeriaThe Nigerian Senior Special Advisor to the President on theMDGs, with support from the Earth Institute’s SustainableEngineering Laboratory, developed the Nigeria MDGInformation System, an online interactive data platformwhich gives the location and status of health, water andeducation facilities. These data were collected by trainedenumerators using Android-based smartphones to collectlocation information using GPS and combined with dataavailable through surveys. Using this system, allgovernment health and education facilities as well as wateraccess points were mapped across Nigeria within a meretwo months. The data are freely available online.