Big data dilemma….Sana Azmat Rana
WITH its potential to bring huge benefits to the state and businesses, big data has been attracting increasing international interest over the decades. Can Pakistan, the fifth most populous country in a world of over eight billion people, harness big data to smartly manage human capital and boost national economic growth? The opportunity to do so is certainly there.
At the moment, we have a fuzzy picture of population numbers in various categories the delay in carrying out the promised digital census has not helped. Without all the data, understanding the countrys population dynamics becomes an arduous task. But we do know, for instance, that the majority of the people belong to the working-age category.
The shortage of decent job opportunities, which is one of Pakistans biggest challenges, and the current recessionary trends require major policy decisions. This requires policymakers to take decisions rooted in a variety of data and comprehensive analyses of the information collected. True, there are multiple programmes that are operating at the same time that collect huge data that can be used to make interventions. International non-profits, with their respective areas of specialisation, are also in the picture. And yet, regardless of all the efforts, the larger picture of population dynamics in Pakistan is not a cohesive one and seems to be missing a major part.
Pakistan is a signatory to several international conventions and declarations and has made some progress in attempting to make good on its commitments. It continues to work on mainstreaming the 2030 SDGs and incorporating them in its policies and strategies. However, a great deal remains to be done.
Working in silos will prevent the larger picture from emerging.
The initial step is to manage and streamline the immense data that is already being collected. This can only happen if we digitise data and if institutes are held accountable for the quality and completeness of the information they provide.
Nadra is the custodian of our national data and its multipronged goals of providing digital solutions to facilitate the public, while keeping data confidential, has even led to international recognition. However, the data that Nadra has is only registered information and does not represent the complete picture this limits the benefits that our national data repository can provide.
One of the areas where this is most visible is healthcare. For instance, the federal health ministry claims to be the curator of big health data. The government has attempted to invest in a system to manage health information in order to improve the delivery, coordination and quality of healthcare through the use of health information technology and clinical data exchange. And yet, the rate of birth registration was an abysmal 42.2 per cent, according to the Pakistan Demographic and Health Survey, 2017-18 an improvement of a mere 15.6pc over the preceding 11 years. Additionally, there is no clear source for the number of registered deaths in the country.
If we look at countries that have succeeded in establishing good health systems, it becomes clear that a coordinated approach is needed from all relevant departments of the state; performing in silos does not help. In this modern era, where greater efficiency can be achieved by focusing on creating digital linkages, the first and foremost step in this direction is to invest in digital solutions for the mainstream healthcare sector and to make institutes accountable for the quality and completeness of data. This is necessary for designing, updating and implementing policy interventions.
It goes without saying that a bottom-up approach where individual and community roles at the base are strengthened, with a robust vertical and horizontal inter-departmental coordination mechanism, will be more productive than interventions foisted from above and created on the back of unorganised, incomplete data.
Various challenges associated with digitising data remain. These include the constantly changing volume and nature of information and the need to verify as much of the data as possible, as different sources can come up with vastly varying figures. Providing training in data collection and recruiting experts to analyse and interpret the findings is again difficult. But a serious start has to be made to organise and assess the tools needed to generate data and the amount of funds for such an undertaking. None of these prerequisites is easily available but the dividends of gathering and processing big data to effectively manage the healthcare system, can bring improvements that will offset the costs.
The writer is a public health expert and is working at the Technical Support Unit for Civil Registration & Vital Statistics, Ministry of Planning.
Courtesy Dawn, January 14th, 2023