By Tolu Oyekan, Partner, BCG Lagos
My
maternal grandfather passed away peacefully on March 11, 2021. It is always a
sad thing to lose a loved one and we grieved the death of our Baba, but he had
lived a full life, raised extraordinary children, contributed deeply to his
community, and was ready to move on when he left us.
I
do not raise the issue of Baba’s passing to further my family’s mourning but
rather because of a curious fact surrounding his death: no one knew his exact
age. People say he was 105 years old and that feels right based on the age of
his children and the stories he told about pre-independence Nigeria and of his
youth – and how those stories matched recorded history from the 1920s and
1930s. But the uncertainty about the exact date of Baba's birth is telling; it
is emblematic of the data shortcomings in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA).
This
lack of data is troublesome in several ways. It severely limits our ability to
fully analyse current conditions and livelihood challenges; compare ourselves
to other regions that are facing similar development problems; measure our
progress against goals so that we can take corrective action quickly when
needed; and, importantly, provide critical services to people even in the most
outlying areas.
In
an initial post from March 2021, I laid out the three planning components that
I believed were essential to fast-tracking development in the SSA region -
data, techniques and people. These planning components are not outcomes
themselves; instead, the results we strive for are nicely encapsulated in UN 17
Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which cover healthcare, hunger,
education, jobs, fair wages, economic growth and the environment, among other
critical dimensions. But the three planning components are essential to
achieving the outcomes. In this post, I offer ideas for rapidly expanding our
data, with an underutilized resource at the heart of my recommendations:
religious centres.
The
Africa that Baba grew up in prioritized the spoken over the written word. And
the beauty and impact of the spoken word is evident still in the poetry of
Titilope Sonuga or Tobechukwu Dubem Nwigwe, who tell stories about our history
and ongoing shared experience that are educational and touch our emotions.
Clearly, we don’t want to lose the gift of the spoken word. But for SSA today
and its people, so much depends on what is written down.
For
example, consider the issue of verified identity. Fewer than 50% of children
born in SSA have had their births registered, according to the World Bank. Unlisted on official rolls, these children
are cut off from equitably accessing the healthcare, education, and other
social services that they are otherwise entitled to. At the same time,
government planners are hindered from adequately measuring the composition and
demographic attributes of residents, and often are compelled to set policy
based on judgement versus hard evidence.
Given
the benefits of registering names, dates of life events, and other types of
data – and the fact that sub-Saharan Africans are as eager as anyone else to
utilize government services if they are inexpensive and convenient to access –
we can assume that the dearth of adequate records is in part because providing
data is difficult or too costly. We can improve convenience by increasing the
number of data aggregation points and bringing them closer to people. And we
can do this 'cheaply' by leveraging existing resources. Which is where
religious centres can play a significant role.
Three
steps could enable advancement of this data gathering plan: Expand; Digitize;
Incentivize.
Expand
A
good deal of data is collected today in SSA in formal aggregation points, such
as hospitals and schools, but there are too few of these across the region.
Using hospital beds per person as a proxy for the number of healthcare
facilities and pupil-teacher ratio as a proxy for the number of education
facilities (assuming that the size of the instructor pool is determined by the
prevalence of schools), SSA is well behind most other regions of the world. On the other hand, religious centres are far
more abundant. For instance, in the
United States, there are about 380,000 churches serving roughly 230 million
Christians – or 1.7 churches per 1000 followers – according to an article in
the Akron Beacon Journal. By contrast, in Nigeria there are estimated 24,000
Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG) houses of worship for an estimated 5
million worshippers (4.8 churches per 1,000 followers), according to a report
funded by the Pulitzer Center found. Similar ratios are likely for other faiths
and sects in Nigeria.
Spread
out so broadly across the SSA population and routinely interacting with many
residents once a week or even more, these places of worship would be extremely
convenient venues for people to provide information for government data rolls.
Note that I am not suggesting that we reduce efforts to increase the number and
distribution of formal aggregation points, such as schools and hospitals. They
offer many benefits over and above data collection. I only recommend that we
broaden our data gathering sources to include religious centres and other
informal aggregation facilities that are more plentiful among the region’s
population.
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