The Role of new technologies in advancing official statistics

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

PDF

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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2

3

4

5

Takeaways

The new normal in Statistics

Rethinking governance

New careers in Statistics

Data ecosystems vs.

statistical silos

NSOs vs. NSSs vs. MNOs