Open data portals and platforms
If you are lucky, the data to answer your question may have been gathered and published in an open data portal platform. These are places where data is made freely available to the public for the purposes of research. The data may be subject to a particular usage licence, but should be downloadable for analysis and visualisation.
Open data portals may be maintained by a government agency, such as StatsSA, or they might be published by a multinational non-govermental organisation, such as The World Bank. You will also find academic institutions hosting data portals, such as the Berkley Earth climate data repository. Some civil society organisations, such as OpenUp, also work to "liberate" data from closed, offline formats and turn it into machine readable formats.
What is "Open" and "Closed" data?
Data might be "closed" if it is:
Not published publically at all (eg. email data)
Only published in an offline format (ie. printed)
Published with a restrictive copyright licence
Published in a format that is not easy to import into a spreadsheet, such as a PDF
Open data is usually:
Published in a machine readable format that you can download (eg. a CSV file)
Published under a licence that says you can use it for your purposes without asking for permission
In addition, it should be well maintained and up-to-date.
Examples of Open Data Repositories
As we previous explained open data platforms and portals are created for a variety of different reasons such as contextualizing, procurement and budgeting, entrepreneurship and a wide range of other reasons. Here are some examples.
National stats offices (and central banks)
Open Knowledge Foundation Global Open Data Index
University of Cape Town’s DataFirst microlibrary
African Development Bank’s Data Portal
National Research Foundation (NRF) South African Data Archive
National Research Foundation (NRF)’s Committee on Data for Science and Technology’s Database of Data Resources in Africa
Africa: Tracking Internet Progress in Data & Numbers
Contextualising South Africa
Youth Explorer GCRO Quality of Life Survey
South African Budget Data Portals
Entrepreneurship
World Bank Doing Business Data and New Business Density Survey
Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) Data
Global Entrepreneurship and Development Institute (GEDI) Data
Other examples of useful data sources or resources
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