More Advocacy Needed To Ensure Data Is Collected In The First Place
Rigid legacy data silos should not absolve the government of its responsibility of collecting and sharing better data.
When the government chooses to, it can be ‘creative’ in data collection; the 2017 crime data did, for example, introduce the imaginative category of ‘crimes by anti-nationals’, by clubbing together three sub-sections involving insurgency and terrorism.
In this year’s migrant crisis, the government was able to marshal data on returning migrants – even though it did not fit into any pre-existing survey or system of classification – by doing something as simple as writing to states to ask them to collect this data. Given that most returning migrants faced some nature of health quarantining, collecting this data became more actionable.
Pushing for more administrative data to be made and kept…