Ahead of the 17th Urban Age Conference and the first to be held in Africa, Sebastian Kriticos and Astrid Haas discuss the need for better data to tackle some of Africa’s biggest urbanisation challenges

Haas, Astrid

Kriticos, Sebastian

English

LSE Research Online

Data for decision-making: how spatial data is shaping the African urbanisation storyLSE Research Online URL for this paper: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/103066/Version: Published VersionOnline resource:Haas, Astrid and Kriticos, Sebastian (2018) Data for decision-making: how spatialdata is shaping the African urbanisation story. International Growth Centre Blog (26 Nov 2018). Blog Entry. lseresearchonline@lse.ac.ukhttps://eprints.lse.ac.uk/ ReuseItems deposited in LSE Research Online are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved unless indicated otherwise. They may be downloaded and/or printed for private study, or other acts as permitted by national copyright laws. The publisher or other rights holders may allow further reproduction and re-use of the full text version. This is indicated by the licence information on the LSE Research Online record for the item.06/01/2020 Data for decision-making: How spatial data is shaping the African urbanisation story - IGC Bloghttps://www.theigc.org/blog/data-for-decision-making-how-spatial-data-is-shaping-the-african-urbanisation-story/ 1/3Authors Astrid HaasPolicy DirectorIGC London Hub, SeniorManagement, UgandaTeam Sebastian KriticosCities EconomistCities that Work,Researcher Data for decision-making: Howspatial data is shaping the Africanurbanisation storyAhead of the 17  Urban Age Conference andthe first to be held in Africa, Sebastian Kriticosand Astrid Haas discuss the need for betterdata to tackle some of Africa’s biggesturbanisation challenges.On a daily basis, city policymakers need to take decisions:where and how to deliver services, what rates to apply to taxesand where to make investments, amongst others. However, inmany African contexts, they are doing this in the absence ofaccurate and timely information at a very local level. As a resultof this lack of data, it is practically impossible to get a goodsense of where and how people live and work, and ultimatelyhow best to allocate their very scarce resources. This is aparticularly acute challenge in the African context where thereis the constant struggle to adequately service both the existingcity as well as the rapidly growing populations.The data challengeTo date, a great deal of our knowledge on urban Africa comesfrom household and firm surveys, often collected by thenational statistical agencies of countries. Although these are ahelpful starting point, they can be burdened with majorchallenges, including representativeness, frequency, and ofcourse, availability. For example, making a surveyrepresentative requires an up-to-date sample frame from anational census. However, these are few and far between indeveloping nations: only 12 of the 46 countries in sub-SaharanAfrica have held a census in the past decade.[1] Therefore,solely relying on these sources of data to understand andimprove policy making is far from sufficient.A further issue is that methodologies for data collection canvary widely across countries. For example, there are multipledifferent approaches to define where a city begins and endsboth across countries, and even between cities within the samecountries. This has implications for generating a commonunderstanding on the reach and boundaries of cities and suchmethods influence even the simplest of research and policyquestions and significantly challenge our ability to do cross-country comparisons.The future of urban datath06/01/2020 Data for decision-making: How spatial data is shaping the African urbanisation story - IGC Bloghttps://www.theigc.org/blog/data-for-decision-making-how-spatial-data-is-shaping-the-african-urbanisation-story/ 2/3Gathering more data is undoubtedly a key part of the answerbut it can come at the cost of large-scale investments. That said,as our technologies advance, there are increasingly innovativeand exciting ways of studying the urban environmentappearing. Remote-sensing data is a clear example: its greateravailability and use over the past decade has provided uspowerful new ways to understand and track human activityacross our world. In particular, cities research has benefittedfrom it as it can be used to track the growth and sprawl of citiesas well as finer details, such as the location of informalsettlements.Geographic Information System (GIS) platforms have becomeintegral complementary tools to harness the power of spatialdata. A recent example of this is work done by Bachofer andMurray (2018) which combines satellite and socio-economicdata to study housing supply in Kigali. Figure 1 shows thebuilding footprint and types across Kigali, demonstrating thefine level of detail that can come from GIS work, as well as thewide range of applications that could be useful to government.[1] https://international.ipums.org/international-action/samples As mobile phones become increasingly prevalent and availablethroughout the developing world, data from them, includingcall data records (CDR), can provide us high volumes of verytimely information on individuals. Through this so-called BigData we are much better placed, for example, to track collectiveurban mobility, how citizens connect with spatial amenitiesacross the city, and how transport systems could be improved.Duranton and co-authors, for example, are using this data toestimate the welfare loss from congestion across cities inColombia and India. Blumenstock et al (2017) used CDR datain Colombo Sri Lanka to measure the impact of an investmentin a super highway on commuter’s travel patterns.Although these are important foundations for new researchopportunities going forwards, there are challenges in accessingthis data in many countries, as it belongs to private telecomscompanies and even when it can be accessed, it can be difficultto analyse. Most importantly, however, in most cases it willhave to be calibrated with surveys to allow for concreteconclusions to be drawn.Bridging the divideOverall, these improvements in economic research and data arei t tl h i d t di f h t h th06/01/2020 Data for decision-making: How spatial data is shaping the African urbanisation story - IGC Bloghttps://www.theigc.org/blog/data-for-decision-making-how-spatial-data-is-shaping-the-african-urbanisation-story/ 3/3consistently enhancing our understanding of what shapes theurbanisation process. However, as noted, there are oftensignificant challenges in bringing these findings to bear onpolicies and practices that could improve outcomes. Effectivelybridging the gap requires a different approach, namely workingto get policymakers clear, consistent, and credible informationto guide their decisions.A powerful approach to this is being undertaken by LSE Cities:they have assembled a broad range of comparative data from anumber of different sources on how global cities perform acrosskey spatial, social, economic, and environmental indicators.Their visual information, as seen in Figure 2, is easily accessibleto policymakers, allowing them to assess performance againstother well-known cities, and helping to ensure the results aretransparent and actionable. Recently, LSE Cities have startedproviding this type of information for African cities, the firstresults of which will be showcased in the forthcoming UrbanAge conference, in Addis Ababa.Figure 2Bringing it all togetherA further key factor is that cities in developing countriesthemselves could do much more to collect as well as coordinateand share data across different institutions.  One example is theCity of Cape Town that is pioneering efforts on the continentby introducing a dedicated research and data strategy toimprove evidence-based decision making for the city. The aimof these strategies is both to ensure that they are making themost of the stock of data they already have, as well asidentifying important data gaps and how to resolve these.Accurate data that decision-makers can trust and understand,will help us build the policy narrative around African cities in away that is more reflective of the reality at hand. It will bothsupport research that can take place around urbanisation on thecontinent, and more importantly, it will support the dailydecisions that policymakers in allocating their scarce resources.Although we have made and continue to make tremendousprogress, there is still some way to go. Therefore, workingtowards improved means of collecting, using, and disseminatingboth existing and new data sources should be a cornerstone ofthe African urbanisation agenda. 

Data for decision-making: how spatial data is shaping the African urbanisation story

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Data for decision-making: how spatial data is shaping the African urbanisation story

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