Data Quality is Way Underrated, and We Should Start Funding It.

The title for this post is inspired by: Forecasting is Way Overrated, and We Should Stop Funding It — Less Wrong Summary Data quality in Africa is near-universally poor, especially at a sub-national level. Organisations and individuals who care about development, poverty alleviation and social welfare should fund measures and programmes that improve data quality via technical assistance. With good data, ‘mysteries’ of African (under)development can be better addressed, and more people can be lifted out of poverty across the continent.IntroductionThere’s a general consensus that data quality in Africa is very, very bad — regardless of the source. The IMF, World Bank and the UN all report to have an abundance of socio-economic and demographic data on every corner of the world, including Africa. But there is plenty of reason to believe that Africa has a data quality problem that even the major global institutions can’t get around and that most data is just made up. The implications are real, both for how we understand what’s happening on the ground and for what evidence-based interventions actually make sense. For someone like me, running armchair regressions to answer questions I’m curious about, the stakes of using unreliable data are relatively low. For the people making far higher-stakes decisions on the back of the same numbers, they’re not.The ImportanceConsider decisions made by bureaucrats working in a foreign aid department for some major government. They might use (unreliable) data from an international organisation that reports infant mortality, PPP per capita income, and maternal mortality to decide how much money they should give to NGOs working on these respective matters. If the reported data is wrong, in any of these areas, we have an obvious problem. It’s also a complication for those working within the country, such as domestic civil servants. If you don’t know how many people live somewhere, let alone what they earn, there is a hard ceiling on what can