Today, Nigeria is in the midst of implementing its Vision 2020, one of Africa’s most ambitious national development plans. Designed to grow Nigeria into one of the world’s 20 largest economies by 2020, this plan outlines hundreds of goals and targets for government agencies. Specific targets in this plan include: doubling the country’s GDP per capita, halving its maternal mortality and HIV prevalence ratio, and almost tripling the number of fully immunized children; all between 2008 and 2013. In pursuit of these goals, the Nigerian government has worked to adopt a data-driven approach to its programming. Implementation of this approach has come to depend on the advocacy and support of “data leaders” within Nigeria’s many government agencies. Biyi Fafunmi is one such leader.
After joining Nigeria’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) in 2006, Biyi quickly realized that NBS’s staff and stakeholders |  Biyi Fafunmi | |
were not taking full advantage of the data available to them. “I wanted people to understand the usefulness of the data they were producing,” he said.
Later that year, Biyi attended a workshop led by the DevInfo Support Group where he discovered DevInfo’s rich visualization features. “Using (DevInfo’s) maps and charts, it allows users to understand better than simply looking at the tables, rows, and columns to determine which state is doing well,” Biyi said. “Just looking at a map, the different colors speak directly to the situation much more clearly than viewing tables.” Biyi became determined to master DevInfo to demonstrate the untapped potential of NBS’s data. [...] | ||
