KIGALI, 6 MAY 2019 - The National Institute of Statistics of Rwanda (NISR) in partnership with the United Nations Global Working Group (GWG) on Big Data for Official Statistics and the African Development Bank (AfDB) organized the 5th International Conference on Big Data for Official Statistics in Kigali from April 29 to May 03 2019 at the new NISR Training Centre.

This was the first time this conference has been hosted in Africa and around 300 participants from 87 countries, including Statistics Offices in Africa, attended the conference to discuss new ways to produce statistics faster, more frequently, and in more detail. The theme of the conference was Learning and Working Together’.

The first 3 days of the week were devoted to training workshops, as well as a series of technical seminars on using data science for official statistics. The workshops focused on the use of mobile phone data to produce migration and tourism statistics, and the use of scanner data to produce consumer price statistics.

The main conference was held on the final 2 days of the week and consisted of panel discussions focusing on the importance of Big Data for official statistics and sharing experiences of initiatives for Big Data for official statistics.

The conference concluded with a Kigali Declaration which reinforced support and governance structures for the UN Global Platform, an online platform that facilitates the exchange, development and sharing of data, methods, tools and expertise, across the global statistical community (including UN and government agencies, private sector, researchers, academics and civil society).

The conference offered an opportunity to officially launch the NISR Training Centre and NISR Data Science campus which will help drive data innovation in Rwanda. In this new building, NISR have offered to host a regional hub of the UN Global Platform to support capacity development of analysts in the region and in Africa to produce official statistics using Big Data. (END)