By George Aine
Data is essential as a basis for making decisions but it remains scattered across government institutions and users cannot readily access it, experts have noted.
This was during a roundtable meeting for stakeholders in Kampala on Friday.
“The integration of the different data sources available at the different institutions into a common pool to propel development … is vital but currently curtailed by the duplication in data sourcing and the lack of an integrated system to have the available data sourced by the different institutions,” said Prof George William Otim, the chairman of the Africa Innovations Institute.
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Ms Lucy Iyango, the assistant commissioner in charge of wetlands management at the Ministry of Water and Environment, said whereas the Uganda National Bureau of Statistics (UBOS) is the official custodian of data, there is a lot more data spread across government departments, ministries and agencies that needs to be collected into a common pool.
The meeting was attended by officials from the ministries of Agriculture, Water and Environment, the National Environment Management Authority (NEMA) and Makerere University, among others.
It was aimed at finding how the proposed data integration process may work to improve data sharing among government departments and the private sector.
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