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Experts and government officials participating in the recently concluded Data Analytics, Artificial Intelligence and Data Governance Symposium have all underscored the need for the government, the private sector and not-for-profits to adopt big data analytics and artificial intelligence for efficient and evidence-based decision-making.
Organised by Task Managers Limited, one of a few data analytics firms in Kampala, the symposium brought together leaders in government, the private sector, not-for-profits and academia to, among others, explore the role of data analytics and artificial intelligence in driving social-economic transformation in Uganda.
The event, held on the 14th of November at the Kampala Sheraton Hotel, was headlined by Rt. Hon Thomas Tayebwa, the Deputy Speaker of the Parliament of the Republic of Uganda and renowned economist Dr Fred Muhumuza was a keynote speaker.
A panel of experts moderated by Michael Niyitegeka, a Business Technology Strategist was composed of Collin Babirukamu, the Director of e-Government Services at the National Information Technology Authority of Uganda (NITA-U); Jacqueline K. Opondo, the Board Chairperson, Opportunity Bank Uganda; Mercy Kainobwisho, the Registrar General of the Uganda Registration Services Bureau (URSB) and Dr James Magara, the Founder of Jubilee Dental Clinics.
During the event, Rt. Hon Tayebwa also launched The Corporate Trainer, a dedicated training division of Task Managers that seeks to empower professionals and organisations through cutting-edge training programs designed to enhance data analytics and business intelligence skills to drive business success.
“The CorporateTrainer is a data analytics training course, the first of its kind, possibly in Africa. This course has been laid down according to the international certification for digital literacy. By investing in Task Managers’ data analytics and business intelligence courses and consultancy services, organisations can streamline operations, reduce manual data work, and significantly improve decision-making processes. This leads to time savings, improved efficiency, and higher profitability as staff can focus on strategic tasks instead of data wrangling,” Arthur Ronald Arinaitwe, the Chief Executive at Task Managers, told CEO East Africa Magazine.
“Every decision-maker in business is faced with a decision-maker’s dilemma. The decision maker’s dilemma is to choose whether you want to go with the most convenient or the most obvious course of action or whether you want to try several courses of action. The reality is that if you do not have the skill to analyse data to explore different options that you have available with your data, you will go with the most convenient option. Organisations that don’t invest in data-driven solutions miss out on enhanced forecasting, performance insights, and automation. This can lead to inefficient processes, higher error rates, and missed opportunities for growth and competitive advantage,” Arthur adds.
Data analytics and artificial intelligence for development
Speaking at the event. Rt. Hon. Thomas Tayebwa emphasised the importance of the government fully adopting digitalisation to harvest and harness the evidence-based decision-making that data analytics and Artificial Intelligence present. He also emphasised the importance of regulation.
“Whether we want it or not, data is going to shape the world. I don’t think we have any future that has no influence on data,” Tayebwa said, adding: “If we take advantage of technology and AI, we should be able to easily process this data and save much more time”.
He, however, said that there was an urgent need to create laws to regulate the usage of Artificial Intelligence to ensure it enhances equitable development but also to guard against possible misuse.
“We need a law to regulate data usage. We need a law to enable our ambitious young people whom we have here, to be able to utilise the skills they’ve acquired, especially in very sensitive areas, to do with the ethical part of AI. Otherwise, if we don’t look at the ethical part of it, my fear is it might end up widening the gap between the rich and the poor, and that’s my biggest fear. We have to ensure that this data correction, this AI advent, does not widen the gap between the rich and the poor”.
He also said that given the powerful technology firms behind much of this technology, it would be more feasible to approach regulation from a continental perspective.
“We must approach it from a continental or global perspective to say what is good for Europe should be good for Africa and Uganda,” he said, adding: “The data is evolving. Systems for processing data are evolving all the time. We now need to strengthen the legal regime. Of course, we’ve done so with the Data Protection Act, but I think we need to update it because it is evolving,” he said.
Delivering the keynote address, Dr Fred Muhumuza called for data integration between government agencies so as to enhance quicker decision-making that facilitate efficient service delivery.
“Why should I go to get a passport renewed and they want to pick my thumbprint and my face, but the first thing they ask me is my national ID; yet by the time I have a national ID, I already submitted all those details,” he wondered.
He added that while big data is important for quick, relevant decision-making for social-economic transformation on key aspects such as value addition in agriculture, infrastructure investments, addressing skilling gaps, solving unemployment, healthcare, risk management, tracking the impact of government expenditure, etc.’ care needed to be taken to harvest, process and store the right kind of data.
Stanbic Bank boosts unsecured SACCO loans from sh200m to sh4 billion“Because we do not have relevant information on the table, anybody says anything, and they win. Decisions are being made through all sorts of talk,” he said, adding: “Without data, decisions will always be political. But you don’t want to go into a political space without information”
“AI comes in very handy because it’s going to help us to improve our decisions, provide advanced analytics and ability to predict; big data analytics is the way to go for us. Big data analytics and artificial intelligence are a very, very welcome turbo on our engine,” he said.
The need for data leadership and data governance
To fully harness the benefits of big data and artificial intelligence for businesses and government, Jacqueline Opondo, the Board Chairperson of Opportunity Bank, called for a focus on data leadership and data governance, especially at the board and senior management levels.
Data leadership refers to the ability to guide and influence an organisation’s use of data to achieve strategic goals, improve decision-making, and drive innovation, while data governance is the process of managing the availability, usability, integrity, and security of data in an organisation.
“Everything rises and falls on leadership. Even when we talk about government integration of data, we are talking about policy first. Even in organisations like banks, it all starts with the leadership, which is the board that provides strategic direction and oversight but also puts in place the policies and makes sure the governance systems are working,” she said, adding: “The earlier we begin looking at the people who have the technical know-how; people who breathe and live AI/Data, the better,” she said.
Ms. Opondo said that having the right board is a step in the right direction because they will ask the right questions, recruit the right people as well as optimally allocate the right kind and amount of resources towards the big shift towards big data analytics and artificial intelligence.
Emphasising the need for skilling and upskilling in data science and artificial intelligence, Collin Babirukamu, the Director of e-Government Services at the National Information Technology Authority of Uganda (NITA-U), said that data skills were an important prerequisite.
“Everybody is saying data is the new oil; data is the new soil⏤ you can plant and get anything out of it⏤ and that data is the new electricity. We were excited about electricity before, but then came the internet. Now has come artificial intelligence. Artificial Intelligence is nothing but data and making use of data to do some human-like activity. But I want to say that data is not the new oil; it’s only the data that you use that is the new oil. That’s why data science- the extraction of knowledge from data, is very important. It is not important to just collect data; I believe very strongly that it’s only the data that you extract, analyse and use that is important,” Babirukamu said.
Mercy Kainobwisho, the Registrar General at the Uganda Registration Services Bureau (URSB), also emphasised the importance of data analytics, artificial intelligence and data governance, saying it is a “subject that we should have discussed many years ago”.
“Before you talk about data analytics, for me, it is how you make sense of the data that you have,” she said, adding” “Artificial intelligence is an enabler to making sense of this data, to the cleanup of the data, the reliability and the security. But as we do this as a country, we do not have an artificial intelligence policy. We don’t have an artificial intelligence law; the closest is the data protection laws and the ethical issues around it. And, of course, you can’t govern what you don’t know⏤ when it comes to data governance and data leadership, etc, you can’t govern what you don’t know”.
Speaking about the benefits of digitising businesses, Dr James Magara, the Founder of Jubilee Dental Clinics, urged businesses to embrace digitisation, which enables them to harvest and process data about their entire ecosystem for business decision-making.
Dr. Magara, who spoke from his own experiences, said, “If you don’t know how to mine data, you don’t understand your business”.
“Now we have a system where every single Monday morning, we’re analysing data. We know how many attendances we had last year, not just the number of patients but also the frequency because the patient can come five times in a year. We know how many attendances per doctor, per day, per week. When we analyse the data, we begin to appreciate why certain figures are going up and others down. We see patterns we had never seen before,” he testified.
“Without data, I realised that I made a lot of decisions based on whims, and this is happening unfortunately across society. A lot of decisions are being made just because of either political expediency or opportunity or other reasons and not based on facts. Being able to analyse data puts us in a space where we can make very, very intelligent decisions, and decisions that will have a great impact,” he reckoned.