The African Development Bank Group has recently launched the 'Open Data for Africa' as part of the bank's goal to improve data management and dissemination in Africa. The Open Data for Africa is a user friendly tool for extracting data, creating and sharing own customized reports, and visualising data across themes, sectors and countries in tables, charts and maps. The platform currently holds data from 20 African countries : Algeria, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Malawi, Morocco, Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria, Ghana, Rwanda, Republic of Congo, Senegal, South Africa, South Sudan, Tanzania, Tunisia, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

The Open Data for Africa platform

The knoema powered Open Data for Africa platform is a collection of data sets from the bank's initiatives and also from other international developmental partners operating in the identified 20 African countries.Users can visualize time series development indicators over a period of time, perform comprehensive analysis at country and regional levels, utilize presentation-ready graphics and query these datasets. The datasets browser facilitates filtering by topic, by sources, by regions and and also offers a search functionality.

Agricultural datasets

While the platform host datasets in the broad developmental perspective, already the platform has some datasets in agriculture such as the main stream agriculture, climate and environment, water and forestry. For example there are 14 datasets under agriculture from various organisations during the period 2010, 2011 and 2012 which can be queried. Datasets can also be filtered by countries or region.The availability of quality data on agriculture in Africa will foster evidence-based decision-making and encourage research within agriculture.