NISR conducted the second meeting of BIG DATA technical team

The National Institute of Statistics of Rwanda (NISR) organised a second Big Data and Analytics Technical Committee meeting on 20^th December 2017 with PhD students in Data Science at University of Rwanda, College of Business and Economy.

The aim of the meeting was to share and discuss with PHD students in Data science various initiatives and/or projects that are being initiated by individuals and institutions, either private or public as part of the implementation of The Data Revolution Policy (DRP) that was adopted by the Cabinet Meeting held on 26 April 2017, 

During this meeting, institutions presented their initiatives as follow:

1. NISR shared key points of the data Revolution Policy and the existing datasets that may be used by PhD students for their academic researches. NISR presented also its training centre that will be having a space dedicated to big data analytics where researchers will be having access to various datasets from different sectors,

2. Rwanda Utilities Regulatory Authority (RURA) presented their project to develop a data warehouse that will be having raw data from transport, telecoms and other sectors that they regulate,

3. Rwanda Revenue Authority (RRA) presented also their project of data ware house that will be having raw data from taxes operations and EBM transactions,

4. The African Center of Excellence in Data Science presented their programs of masters, PhD and professional courses in Data science,

5. Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) presented their initiatives to use big data for estimating poverty status, health status using medicine selling data, climate status using satellite images.

6. Toyota group presented their Traffic Management System that will use mobile data collected anonymously.

At the end of this meeting, students were requested to collaborate with institutions to come up with projects that will improve the better lives of the population in different sectors. Participants recommended also that institutions would work together to establish one integrated data warehouse that will easy access to different data sets. They also recommended the development of frameworks and guidelines that will govern publishing and accessing those datasets for research purposes.