56th UNSC Side Event: Practical Application of Non-Traditional Data in Official Statistics

Dr. Oliver Chinganya is a Zambian Chartered Statistician (since 1999), Chartered Scientist, and Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society. He currently serves as the Director of the African Centre for Statistics at the UN Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA). The African Centre for Statistics’ main mission is to enable national statistical systems in Africa to produce high-quality statistics, data, and geospatial information to support sound, evidence-based decision-making in line with sustainable development, as well as regional and national priorities.

Dr. Chinganya also serves as Vice President of the International Statistical Institute. From 2018 to 2020, he was Acting Director of the Technology, Climate Change, and Natural Resource Management Division at UNECA. Prior to joining UNECA in 2016, he held other senior leadership roles, including Manager for the Statistical Capacity Building Division at the African Development Bank, Regional Advisor at the International Monetary Fund, and Deputy Director in charge of Research and Dissemination at the Zambia Statistical Office.

Elena Proden (PhD) is a Senior Specialist and Team Leader, Strategic Implementation of the 2030 Agenda Unit, UNITAR. Trained as a development economist, Elena has been leading a UNITAR team working on strategic planning, data and monitoring in support of SDGs. The focus of support to NSOs is on strengthening their capacities as well as those of other stakeholders to unlock the full value of data for sustainable development in close link with immediate and future national and local-level policy-making needs. Elena has been working on capacity development on data partnerships, governance and planning, data analysis, using econometric and machine learning techniques, statistical literacy of data users and contributors. She has also been working on experimental statistics and applied research and developing policy recommendations on leveraging new data sources, including citizen and earth observation data. She is also current Chair of the Global Network of Institutions for Statistical Training.

Dr. Anders Holmberg is the Chief Methodologist/General Manager of the Methodology and Data Science Division at the Australian Bureau of Statistics since September 2019. He has a PhD in Statistics about model assisted survey planning, and a background working with various types of data sources for official statistics in many different countries including Sweden, Cambodia, New Zealand and Norway. He has been a member of Eurostat's Directors of Methodology group and is still a member of the Methodology Advisory boards of Statistics Netherlands and Statistics Sweden. As a practitioner he has worked with the design and collection of sample survey data, the use of multiple administrative data sources in population censuses and administrative data about people, businesses, and properties for statistical and research purposes.

Dr Pramana is Professor of Statistics at Politeknik Statistika STIS, and The Regional Hub on Big Data and Data Science for Asia and The Pacific, BPS Statistics Indonesia. His interests include big data analytics, machine learning, official statistics and artificial intelligence, among other topics. Professor Pramana has published on the analysis and use of a range of non-traditional data sources, including mobile positioning data, sentiment data and online news. As a leading member of The Regional Hub, he works on advancing a number of objectives, including coordination for official statistics institutions and groups working on big data and data science across Asia and the Pacific, conducting research on the use of big data and data science for the development of new statistical methods and techniques, and supporting training, modernisation and advocacy for official statistics at national, regional and global levels.