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Box 8-11. A geographical approach to land accounts inSouth AfricaSouth Africa’s National Development Plan 2030869highlights the need for programmes to conserve andrehabilitate ecosystems and biodiversity assets. It calls forfull cost accounting that internalises environmental costs inplanning and investment decisions. In order to understandthe changes in ecosystems and biodiversity assets and theirability to provide ecosystem services, pilot land cover andland use accounts were developed. Consistent land coverdata at a fine spatial scale (20m resolution) were availablefrom the provincial conservation authority, Ezemvelo KZNWildlife, for the period 2005-11 (Figure 8-12). Analysis ofKwaZulu-Natal’s land cover data showed that between2005 and 2011 there was outright loss of approximately570,000 ha of natural vegetation, or about 7% of theprovince’s area, much of which was converted fromgrassland or savanna to low density settlements or tocultivation. This habitat conversion can have cumulativeimpacts on ecosystem services like water and energyprovision, which in turn can have an impact on economicand social goals and policies. Indeed, in KwaZulu-Natal,approximately 400,000 households (16%) use wood as theirmain energy source for cooking, and approximately350,000 households (13.5%) have no formal water supplyinfrastructure.Figure 8-12. Land cover data, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africaunderstand how innovative they are, it is worth analysingfirst how accessible data currently are across officialinstitutions, big data providers, scientific institutions andNGOs.Websites are considered the most practical mean to accessdata. Worldwide, national statistical offices from only fivecountries do not have a website, but three of these are inAfrica. 870 Another five African countries have a nonfunctionalwebsite. 871 Even when a website exists, theofficial statistics are not always available online and evenwhen they are, the format is not always easy to downloadand manipulate. A recent preliminary study evaluated ninecountries worldwide on the openness of their official data –three of them in sub-Saharan Africa. The evaluation criteriaconsidered a country to be more open towards its officialdata if: data are available in machine-readable formats andcan be read with free and non-commercial software; userscan select the data of interest to them; metadata arepresent; the terms of use of the data are clear and allow forfree use and reuse of the data. The three sub-SaharanAfrican countries had comparatively lower scores thancountries from other regions. 872Access to data other than official statistics is more difficultto evaluate, as there are no worldwide establishedpractices. Providing access to cell phone records is often adecision of the cell phone carriers. Most application of cellphone records for development purposes are concentratedin a few countries in Africa, in part because those countrieshave more collaborative cell phone carriers. Raw socialmedia data is also not readily accessible. Google has a basiconline interface in which users can look for frequency ofonline searches of a given work or phrase since 2005. 873Twitter and Facebook have developed free tools for usersto search for specific data, but these tools have limitationsin their accuracy and coverage. But the raw social mediadata, which would be needed for proper data analysis, isexpensive. 874Source: Data courtesy of Ezemvelo KZN Wildlife.8.4. Innovative means of sharing dataIn many countries, users are often frustrated by limitedaccess to data and the absence of tools to allow for analysisand visualisation. As elsewhere in the world, data access inAfrica can bump into institutional, financial andtechnological obstacles. Some initiatives promoting freedissemination of data have been established, but to163Low resolution satellite images tend to be free 875 but higherresolution images, 876 which are needed for instance forurban planning and management of land ownership, arecommercial (though often free for research purposes). Theprices of high resolution images vary with the vendor but,in general, are expensive. Although the cost is going downglobally, high resolution images are still not affordable bymany users in developing nations, including Africa. Due tothese unaffordable costs, organizations in Africa oftencompromise the accuracy of the geo-information producedby using lower resolution satellite data.As for scientific data, researchers and scientific institutionshave their say on what to share but there have been strong