Coordination : Françoise GUBRY and Francis GENDREAU
francoise.gubry@ceped.org

 

IREDA (Inventory of censuses and demographic surveys in Africa) is a project of the ValDemo international working group set up by the UMR CEPED research support bureau, in partnership with PARIS21 and INSEE.

Goals

The aim of the IREDA project is to produce a summary description of all African demographic operations (populations surveys and censuses), both past and present, to provide information on existing metadata, to promote access to these metadata by researchers and to develop their use in a comparative perspective.

The metadata of interest for the project include all available written and electronic documents concerning the pre- and post-collection phases (technical documents, manuals for interviewers, questionnaires, maps, coding manuals, database documentation, publication of results and analyses, etc.).

Project structure

The IREDA project includes the construction of a centralized IREDA website and an OAI/PMH REDATEK open archive. Other open archives may be developed on the partners’ initiative and hosted on their respective websites.

The IREDA site will present the inventory of African demographic censuses and surveys in conformity with the DDI (Data Documentation Initiative) standard. The IREDA portal will provide access to general resources available on each of these operations via links to corresponding sites (national statistical institutes, ACAP, IPUMS-International, IHSN, AASDA, etc).

Open archives may also be set up in each of the partner DEMONETA centres. The documentation on censuses and demographic surveys available in these centres will be digitized and held on REDATEK, and in some cases on their own archive sites under the AOAI/PMH protocol, and will be accessible via tha IREDA site, subject to consent by the producer and relevance to the project. The archive sites will run on open source software, such as Greenstone for example, so that bibliographic references can be recovered directly from documentary applications such as CDS-Isis.

Strengthening the capacities of the research and training centres of the DEMONETA network

Data will be fed into IREDA in partnership with the centres of the DEMONETA network, the statistical institutes, Afristat and IHSN. The Institut de Formation et de Recherche Démographiques (IFORD), based in Yaoundé in Cameroon, is one of CEPED’s most long-standing partners. With documentary resources complementary to those of CEPED, IFORD will be the first Southern institute to take part in the project. It is also a key institution for the exploitation of existing African data via training and research programmes. The other partner centres will be associated with the IREDA project: CEFORP, ENSEA, ISSP and URD.

Via the IREDA project, CEPED’s partner research and training centres will be equipped with a demographic data archiving tool (the toolkit proposed by IHSN) and will receive training in its use. They will then be able to use the toolkit to enhance the availability of their resources. The documentation in their possession directly linked to demographic data collection operations will be digitized by the IREDA project for entry into the open archives of REDATEK and of each of these centres.

Close relations with national statistical institutes

IREDA will provide a means to disseminate information to researchers on the work of the statistical institutes, thereby increasing its visibility and facilitating access to data. Subject to their authorization, the IREDA site will provide visitors with a systematic link to the sites of the national statistical institutes and direct access to electronic publications on topics relevant to the IREDA project.

At a later stage, IREDA may enable the national statistical institutes to recover electronic documentation held by the research community, notably that concerning older surveys.

Close collaboration with IHSN

The database underpinning the IREDA website will be based on the data available on the IHSN website and on the inventory drawn up by the research support bureau of UMR CEPED. In the initial stage, the IREDA site will provide a validated inventory of censuses and national demographic data collection operations, along with available publications.

Information published on the IREDA website will then be fed into the databases of the IHSN and of the statistical institutes and DEMONETA partners interested in systematic web service updating.

Regular maintenance

The IREDA site will be maintained by the research support bureau of UMR CEPED.

Maintenance will involve three types of task:
  organize and verify systematic data input to IREDA from IHSN partner national statistical institutes via RSS web feed;
  keep track of document output from new national data collection operations in other African countries, notably those which have not yet adopted the Nada archiving policy;
  subject to authorization by data producers, update CEPED’s REDATEK open archive whenever new documents are acquired (via other projects with which ValDemo is asociated, SEDET’s e-geopolis and IPUMS-International/Datanet of the Minnesota Population Center).

Development outlook

Enhancing the visibility of existing demographic data is a prerequisite for developing research that makes use of these data. The IREDA project was set up by an international working group, ValDemo, whose purpose is not only to facilitate access to available data, but also to develop analysis of these data in a perspective of comparison between different collection operations. IREDA is a starting point for the development of research and analysis projects based on national demographic data.