This month, OpenUp has kicked off a collaboration with the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data to train civil servants, academics, professionals and activists from all over Africa in the fundamentals of data science. Specifically, we are discussing how to use climate and health data more effectively for communication and planning. In this first phase, twenty-six workshops will be delivered over 13 weeks as part of the Global Partnership for Sustainable Data’s Capacity Accelerator Network (CAN), a partnership that includes data.org. Excitingly, it is building on our growing interventions in the region, and our French language support for these new services.
To facilitate data-driven and evidence-based planning and policy, there is a need to promote more data science skills across stakeholders groups in the African policy making ecosystem. The African Union’s own Data Policy Framework (2022), when considering data challenges in the African public sector in particular noted: “...poor STEM and ICT and digital skills means, there is limited existing talent to fully make use of big data analysis techniques and data science to create value from accumulated or produced data”.
There simply aren’t enough people with the right skills to gather, maintain and analyse data effectively - and while machine learning technologies and scalable tech platforms are taking some of the load, it’s imperative that capacity continues to be developed to avoid reliance on overseas skills, systems and software.
Two critical themes
OpenUp’s work is focussed on the very broadest, entry point to the CAN initiative: the training programme. We aim to give people a solid understanding of fundamental tools, issues and opportunities in healthcare and climate data, and how to utilise data science and data communication to better address challenges as we head into an uncertain future.
Our own challenge has been balancing content between these three pillars of the programme, in order to leave individuals feeling truly empowered in their day-to-day work, and with a clear idea of where to go next. We knew from the outset that what we couldn’t do was turn more than 100 participants from a wide variety of geographies and backgrounds into expert data scientists, climatologists and healthcare informatics professionals in three months. So we have put together a curriculum that provides the fundamentals on all three subjects, supported by libraries of further information and steps to help self teaching. Importantly too - both for building trust, growing skills directly and meeting the diverse needs of a great and varied group - we offer one-to-one coaching for those who want to take things further.
We’re also keen to emphasise the “network” part of the Capacity Acceleration Network. As well as an opportunity to find out how to find and wrangle climate data, it’s important that we lead sessions in which participants who are scattered geographically can come together to find like-minded individuals who want to address the same issues. This includes our own network of tutors, and we’ve found it to be a most rewarding experience to reconnect with or discover new talented and experienced individuals in order to ask them to be part of this programme. It is an approach we’ve been growing for our social impact incubator support, as well.
In many cases, we know that there are people on the course who will have greater knowledge than the tutors in specific areas, coming as they do from national statistics offices or niche climate or health NGOs - and we are committed to creating an environment in which they feel comfortable to share their skills with peers too, leveraging our African talent.
The CAN training programme runs from July to October 2024, and will be repeated next year. To find out more about this and other parts of the CAN initiative, you can visit our partner’s page here.
