Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia
The Role of new technologies in
advancing official statistics
Haidar Fraihat, Ph.D. United Nations – ESCWA November 9, 2022 Haidar Fraihat, Ph.D. United Nations – ESCWA November 9, 2022
Meeting of the
Technical Committee of the Arab Statistics Initiative
“Arabstat”
XLS Format
CSV Files
Documents
NSOs Data
NSO
Databases:
- APIs - Local - Cloud
What is going on around in the Data World??
The core business of NSOs is to produce timely statistics and data to their government and to disseminate it effectively .
A Storm in a Cup
Dissemination channels Dissemination
channels
Open DataNGOs Thinks Tanks
Expert Groups
Energy Environment
Population
Poverty Technology
Gender
Statistics are traditionally obtained via surveys and questionnaires:
BUT.. What is going on in the Data Science world.
New digital technologies provided additional data sources, and unconventional methodologies beyond surveys to tap into the wealth of data.
Connected citizens now provide data from:
Mobile phones Social media
Fintech transactions CCTV systems
Smart watches Online activity Etc.
Data Sources Enterprise Data Warehouse & Data Lake
Data Marts
Layer Analytics Layer Data Access Layer
Statistical Systems/Data Providers/Member States (External and Internal)
Unstructured Data Sources (Web, News, Images, e-Discussions, etc.)
ETL
Contextualized data to Serve Particular needs
Operational Systems
Trade Flows
SDG Gateway
GIS, MPI, etc.
Raw data, summary data, and metadata
Centralized Data Portal to access ESCWA Data
Services (one-stop
shop)
ESCWA Staff
MS, Partners, etc.
Portals, Data Aggregators
Data Solutions Team:
XLS Format
CSV Files
PDF Docum ents N S O s D at a NSO Databa ses:
- A
P I s
- L
o c a l
- C
l o u d
At ESCWA, we are developing a data ecosystem that leverages NSOs statistics as a data source, while capitalizing on new digital technologies to go beyond data collection.
We introduced 4 additional data layers:
Sentiment Analysis
UN Secretary-General’s Data Strategy
UN-ESCWA Data Strategy
I II III IV
V VI
A M i n u t e o n t h e I n t e r n e t 28 000 subscribers
watching on Netflix
69 million messages sent on WhatsApp 500 hours of content
uploaded on YouTube
197.6 million emails sent
9 132 connections made on LinkedIn
1.6 million USD spent online
Data from Statista:
https://www.statista.com/chart/25443/estimated- amount-of-data-created-on-the-internet-in-one- minute/
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Takeaways
The new normal in Statistics
Rethinking governance
New careers in Statistics
Data ecosystems vs.
statistical silos
NSOs vs. NSSs vs. MNOs
