It has been a decade since the African Data Initiative (ADI) was launched at the ISI World Statistics Congress in Rabat, Morocco. ADI was established with a clear mission: to improve statistical understanding and reasoning across Africa by developing tools, curricula, and capacity-building approaches that are accessible, contextually relevant, and sustainable in low-resource environments. Its first major initiative was the development of R-Instat, a free and powerful statistical software designed to make rigorous data analysis accessible even where connectivity and computing resources are limited — and to place real data at the heart of teaching and learning.
Over the past decade, ADI has grown well beyond that founding initiative, expanding into a family of interconnected projects spanning West Africa, East Africa, and Southern Africa, each responding to local needs while contributing to a shared vision of statistical empowerment on the continent.
This session brings together five presenters who have been directly involved in implementing ADI initiatives across these regions to share what they have built, what they have learned, and what has proved more difficult than anticipated. Their contributions span a range of contexts, from shifting how statistics is taught for research support in West Africa, to applying data tools in agro-ecological research in Kenya, to supporting smallholder farmer decision-making using climate information in Zambia, offering a rich, multi-country picture of ADI in practice.
The session will be structured to move from the broad to the specific: an opening talk will provide context and framing for the decade as a whole, before individual presentations illuminate particular initiatives and the lessons they carry. Taken together, the presentations will allow the session to honestly assess ADI's successes and the challenges that remain, including questions of sustainability, reach, and what it takes to shift statistical culture in diverse institutional and educational settings.
The session will also feature contributions from statistics educators based in Africa, who will share their perspectives on how statistics education has changed over this period and what more needs to happen. Their voices are central to the session's purpose: this is not simply a report on what has been done, but a conversation about what Africa's experience can teach the global statistics community about building more equitable, grounded, and effective statistical capacity.