Out-of-school children (OOSC) has long been a global problem that affects a country in various ramifications. With 10.5 million OOSC, Nigeria is recognised to have the largest number of children not attending school in the world. The economic and social repercussions of not educating these children in Nigeria are examined in this brief. Exploratory data analysis and empirical estimation reveal the following facts:

• Economic costs due to OOSC in Nigeria is estimated to be about US$40 billion in modest terms.

• A higher number of rural dwelling children do not go to school as compared to the children living in the urban areas in Nigeria.

• Income poverty keeps more children out of school.

• The Northeast geo-political zone has the largest percentage of OOSC in Nigeria.

Sudan has transitioned to the era of demographic dividend. Yet, evidence from various sources shows that adequate policies have not been put in place to enable the country to achieve this dividend. While there are indications of progress on policies geared towards achieving demographic dividend, a lot more needs to be done. Hence, after assessing the challenges and opportunities presented by the demographic transition in Sudan, this policy brief recommends five strategic policy areas needed to adequately position Sudan for a demographic dividend. The policy areas cover policies on education, health, economic growth, and political commitment.

In many countries, myriad policy efforts and initiatives have been launched toward achieving the goal of Education for All. These include: grass-roots lobbying for the importance of schooling, political declarations for universal access to education, introduction of school fees abolition initiatives, and/or pro-poor education financing frameworks, among others (UNICEF, 2018, p.2). Despite these efforts, too many children are still excluded from schooling. One of the most recent statistics on out-of-school children and youth (OOSCY) shows that globally, 258  million children and youth are excluded from education, 59.1 million of which are of primary school age, 61.5 million of lower secondary school age, and 137.8  million of upper secondary age (UIS, 2019). Half of the world’s OOSCY population are concentrated in fourteen countries alone, nine of which are in sub-Saharan Africa and of which five are from West Africa including: Nigeria, Ghana, Mali, Burkina Faso and Cote d’Ivoire (Milan & Nicholas, 2015). Nigeria ranks highest among these five in terms of its number of out-of-school children, currently reaching up to 10.5 million.

There is an increasing level of attention and growing conversations at the national, regional and global levels, around the imperative for a more effective set of rules and regulations to guide the use and sharing of online data and digital footprints of individuals, firms and governments. The rationale is that a framework of policies and strategies is essential to address the inherent risks emerging from the recent data revolution. Emerging threats range from abuse and misuse of technologies and new communication media, lack of accountability from digital platform firms at the core of the data ecosystem, national security concerns, cyber crime, and user privacy issues. Such policies are intended to make digital platform firms accountable for how data is collected and used to generate insights, stored, shared and protected in order to engender trust in the data ecosystem.
In recognizing the importance of data governance, a grave challenge lies in determining the most appropriate approach to adopt, bearing in mind that the goal is not to “over regulate” which could stifle innovation, nor abuse governmental powers on these issues. Several approaches and frameworks for data governance are emerging in this respect on the African continent.

Data governance remains a difficult concept to unpack even as efforts to understand what good data governance looks like have recently multiplied across the world. CSEA is leading a number of research activities aimed at clarifying what data governance means for the continent and what should be done to set up governance frameworks in African countries. These include a recent event on African data governance (recording available here), a project and subsequent report on Strengthening Data Governance in Africa, and the African Digital Preparedness dashboard.

The Data Values Project spoke with CSEA Director of Research Dr. Adedeji Adeniran to learn about the current state of thinking on this topic and research priorities and needs for the coming years:

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