Innovation Event Explores Risks, Benefits of Exponential Change

“At a day-long event on innovation for the SDGs, technologists from Silicon Valley presented ideas for advancing towards the Global Goals and urged UN Member States to foster a culture of risk-taking. (…) Representatives highlighted: that governments must address citizens’ fears about losing jobs to technology, and help them prepare for new jobs; that it is riskier to proceed without technology than to avoid it; the need to provide resources for countries to implement new technologies and to close the “digital divide”; and the need to balance innovation with protecting people, as in the case of Uber.”

IISD

Rescue old data before it’s too late

“To model the future, we need to be able to examine the past. But our chances to do so are fading fast, sped by misunderstanding and negligence. Few forms of ‘heritage data’ — whether stored on glass plates, paper, old tapes or floppy disks — are easily available for today’s research, so the information on them is effectively lost.”

Nature

Britain's Conservatives appear to mull changes to aid spending rules

“There are still ways that we can improve the way that taxpayers’ money is used to help the world’s most vulnerable people. We do not believe that international definitions of development assistance always help in determining how money should be spent, on whom and for what purpose”, the manifesto of the Conservative Party states. “

Devex

Almost half of all deaths now have a recorded cause, WHO data show

“Several countries have made significant strides towards strengthening the data they collect, including China, Turkey and the Islamic Republic of Iran, where 90% of deaths are now recorded with detailed cause-of-death information, compared with 5% in 1999.”

WHO Media Centre

Africa: Migrant Money Transfers or Development Aid?

“The flow of money from migrants to their native countries is therefore three times as high as global development aid. That's one reason why economists have been arguing for years that remittances from family and friends abroad are far better than charitable aid from the Global North. When money is sent between two private parties, they say, it's usually received by those who need it and then used for a specific purpose.”

All Africa

Should America Keep Giving Billions Of Dollars To Countries In Need?

"There's zero evidence that any of these foreign aid programs have had any effect on development, whether it's in the Middle East or Africa or South America," said Moore, who is a fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. "And there's just zero evidence that any of that development aid has had any effect on raising the living standards." Is Moore right?”

WPSU

In search of the Data Revolution

“Steve Macfeely, Head of Statistics and Information at United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) was the keynote speaker at this conference related to the Executive Master in Business Intelligence and Analytics. His talk questioned whether there has been a data revolution or not, whether ideas such as the 'End of theory' are valid and what all of this means for official statistics, for governments and citizens around the world.”

UNCTAD

Op-ed: Africa’s future hangs in the balance – we dare not fail

“The dawn of the Fourth Industrial Revolution is here. Africa is standing before a small window of opportunity to grow future-ready leaders equipped to take on a new era of industry. It will be our ability to come together and develop those leaders that will determine whether we fly or fall. The tough reality is that radical disruption to skills requirements in the workplace is headed our way as we edge towards the next Industrial Revolution.”

CNBC Africa

Are governments finally facing up to the true cost of disasters?

“"For a small island developing state, it's fundamental for its subsistence to pay more attention to disaster risk, and they usually don't have enough resources to do so - and that's when international cooperation needs to kick in," the humanitarian expert told the live discussion. While the Cancun conference is not expected to yield major new pledges of aid to help countries prepare for and prevent disasters, a high-level discussion bringing in several world leaders will focus on how to cut economic losses by building infrastructure that is more resilient to extreme weather and earthquakes.”

Thomson Reuters Foundation - News

How smartphone boom will drive Africa’s data explosion

“There are around 370 million mobile subscribers in Sub-Saharan Africa, according to the GSMA, a mobile telecoms industry trade body, around 100 million of which are smartphones. The organization forecasts that by 2020 the number of smartphones will rise to half a billion.”

Naija247 News

Developing a data ethics framework in the age of AI

“Luciano Floridi, Professor of Philosophy and Ethics of Information at the University of Oxford, describes two separate outlooks for how AI will develop: "the swimming pool model", which will see the whole world filled to brim with it, and his personal prediction of the "the pothole model", where drips fall on everything, but only fill certain holes up to the top.”

Tech World

Big Data For Achievement Of The 2030 Agenda: Data Privacy, Ethics And Protection

Guidance Note

UNDP

World Health Statistics               

WHO

Spurrious correlations

Conférence d’Afrique Francophone sur les Données Ouvertes (CAFDO 2017)

June 1^st, Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso

Asia-Pacific Economic Statistics Week 2017

22 – 26 May, Bangkok, Thailand

2017 Global Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction

22 – 26 May, Cancun, Mexico