The expectation that the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) will provide a basis for addressing global economic, social and environmental crises assumes the availability of trustworthy, accessible evidence of measurable progress. The lack of policies and systems for managing this information reliably inevitably means that there are gaps in the information and that often its reliability cannot be demonstrated, in Africa or elsewhere. It is important to understand how this situation came about and the impact it has on development.

The SDG approach to measuring progress does not yet take account of the challenges for managing records. Addressing the challenges would make a substantial difference to governments’ ability to measure the goals accurately and protect and preserve development information for future use. Records should document processes, decisions, actions, activities and communications, protect rights and entitlements, inform policy and hold officials accountable for their actions. Any set of information, regardless of its structure or form, can be managed as a record. This includes information in the form of a document, a collection of data or other types of digital or analogue information that are created, captured and managed in the course of business.¹

Poorly managed records can easily be lost, altered, fragmented, corrupted or destroyed. With each of these losses, transparency and accountability are diminished and the ability to measure compliance, extract meaningful data and use the information as a reliable measure of development is compromised. This chapter explores the loss of control of official government records in Africa in the decades following independence as background for understanding the consequences for the ability to trust and use it.²

Today, thanks largely to the determination and leadership of teaching staff in the field of records and archives in universities across Africa, the records profession in Africa is emerging from what have often seemed like insurmountable challenges. The role of records still tends to be largely underecognised and misunderstood, but there is now greater potential for records to make a more meaningful contribution to society than has been possible in the past.

Breakdown of records systems in Africa

At the time of independence, many of the outgoing colonial governments in Africa set up national archives to preserve the historical record of what they left behind. In some cases, these administrations, recognising the power of the information that the records documented, destroyed or hid the more sensitive records rather than handing them over to the new governments.³ Overall, however, the colonial governments left behind basic systems, policies and procedures for managing records. Initially, some of the independent African governments invested resources in their national archives as the agencies responsible for implementing national records policies. However, with immediate development needs and political realities to address, the national archives had to compete with other government agencies for funds, and ironically, as the volume of government records grew, the archives’ budgets declined. National archives in Africa lacked the adequately trained staff and resources needed to develop the legal frameworks and professional systems to support this growth.

The International Council on Archives (ICA) was established in Paris in 1948 to promote the use of records, preserve their integrity, advance the documentation of human experience and make the information in the records available to promote international cooperation. However, while UNESCO did, in principle, support Africa’s new national archives, the wider international community did not see this as a priority and did not invest in addressing the growing issues affecting records in African countries. The small ICA office in Paris lacked the resources to support significant development, and the African national archives remained focused primarily on historical records. The common legal closure period of 30 to 50 years from when records ceased to be in active use often made the archives irrelevant as immediately useful development information for independent governments.

Through the 1970s and 1980s, there was very little investment in the national archives in Africa, and many deteriorated and stagnated as institutions. For instance, equipment needed to protect the records often ceased to function and was too costly to replace. Staff establishments did not grow, and only a small number of professionals were trained abroad, often in skills that did not fit the needs of their institutions. On their return from training, their remuneration and status were low, despite their enhanced skills and the immense challenges they faced. The national archives often found it impossible to accept transfers of closed records from government departments, not only because they lacked the staff to do so but because the repositories constructed at the time of independence now tended to be full to overflowing.

Registry systems for managing active records in ministries and departments also broke down, and often the only procedures available to guide staff had been developed in the colonial period. In many ministries, files were simply opened in a running sequence, with no classification or indexing system and no means of locating or tracking the movement of individual files. It was not unusual for cleaners to be tasked with caring for records. The value of the records as information sources was gradually compromised; file titles did not match file contents, information relating to the same issue was scattered through files with similar titles and policy papers were mixed with papers of ephemeral value. The result was that government policy often was developed and implemented on an ad hoc basis, and officials suffered daily embarrassments as they were unable to access the information they needed to make decisions or to take action.

The breakdown of recordkeeping systems had a direct and growing impact on the ability to govern and on citizens’ lives. When police or court records could not be found, citizens’ rights were denied, judicial processes were manipulated and citizens could be incarcerated without due process of law. Case precedent broke down in the courts, and prisoners detained on remand had little hope of a court hearing if their case records could not be found. When a patient’s medical history could not be located or did not exist, tests had to be repeated unnecessarily or patients were given inappropriate, even risky, treatment. When a civil servant’s personnel file was missing, it was often impossible to claim pension rights, and it was not unusual for civil servants with low qualifications to manipulate the payroll to be paid higher salaries than they were qualified to receive. When land records could not be traced, it was not possible to establish ownership. Legitimate landowners were not able to borrow against title deeds. Financial transactions were difficult to track, and theft of financial assets and corruption became increasingly common. The impact on citizens was increasingly severe, but often the cause went unrecognised.

Records professionals in Africa worked against unequal odds to maintain the integrity of the profession and its contribution to national stability. With inadequate recognition, inadequate resources and inadequate training to address the problems they faced, it was very difficult to see how to reverse the situation.

Records management, structural adjustment, public sector reform and computerisation

The loss of control of public sector records in Africa coincided with several significant trends in international development, which included donor and lender pressure on governments to reduce budget deficits, efforts to reform the structure of the public service and recognition that computerisation was fundamental to controlling government resources and improving efficiency. From the early 1980s, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and other donors and lenders began promoting structural adjustment and public sector reform programmes. The emphasis was on good governance (efficiency, accountability and transparency) and on achieving savings by reducing overall civil service size, often as part of conditionality for loans from Bretton Woods organisations.⁴ Computerisation was viewed as fundamental to achieving these objectives.

When the international community began to focus on developing laws, procedures, organisational structures and management approaches to support these new emphases, it became increasingly apparent that the information needed to underpin accountable, transparent and efficient government was not available. The failure to modernise the records systems needed to support the growth of government made it ever harder to find and use essential information. As Zambia’s deputy minister for home affairs observed:

The solution to the breakdown of government records systems seemed, for many, to lie in computerisation, which would enable countries to leapfrog developments that had taken place elsewhere and provide a modern efficient information base for development. By the mid-1990s, computerisation was a feature of virtually every major donor assistance programme across the public sector in sub-Saharan Africa, particularly in relation to the control of key resources, notably finance and personnel. Paper-based records, which were widely viewed as being disordered, incomplete and difficult to share, were, in many cases, dismissed in favour of digital records and information systems. These newer information systems were viewed as the responsibility of information technology staff, who rarely had training in, or knowledge of, records standards and requirements. The national archives, which lacked information technology experience and tended to be very poorly funded, were largely dismissed as irrelevant to the modern state.

In many sub-Saharan African countries, the national archives, which could have made invaluable contributions to information management reform, were isolated from mainstream policy-making and administration. In the circumstances, they tended to focus on protecting historical records. As computer analysts and system designers were granted increasing respect and status, donors and officials remained unaware of the potential contribution of records professionals and the significance of the international records standards and practices they were developing.

Peter Mazikana, a records specialist from Zimbabwe, was one of the first African records professionals to articulate the significance of records and to advocate involvement of the national archives. At the pan-African Conference on Archival Policies and Programmes in Africa, held in Abuja, Nigeria, in 1994, he noted:

Some administrators did recognise the significance of the records issue. For instance, in Ghana, where the head of the civil service encouraged the production of a documentary video film on the relationship between records management and citizens’ rights, the secretary (minister) for education spoke on camera of his concerns:

As the move towards computerisation accelerated, it was clear that there were more challenges than originally anticipated. In many African countries, power supplies were erratic, hardware and storage media were difficult to obtain, technicians and repair services were not always available. Many countries found themselves locked into foreign-supported systems but were unable to finance maintenance and upgrades. Moreover, the evidentiary value of the digital records created through computerisation depended on the ability to maintain and protect their authenticity, but resources were not available to develop digital records management systems for preserving and protecting the reliability and integrity of the records through time.

When digital records did become more common across Africa, few people in the records profession, in government or in international agencies realised how quickly digital records would become the predominant medium of government communications or how easily they could be lost or distorted. As governments and citizens rapidly came to rely on digital records (created on desktop computers, in databases, in email, on mobile devices, via websites and on social media platforms), there was little understanding of the skills and structures needed to manage them or even of which government agency should be responsible. Whereas previously, government records had been kept in registries/records units and in national archives, now they were often fragmented across multiple systems. Sometimes responsibility for digital records was split between several government agencies, for instance the one responsible for ICT development, the one responsible for access to information and the one responsible for culture; often it was unclear which should lead on policy. Ministries and departments often pursued their own computerisation projects without government-wide coordination.

These issues were by no means limited to Africa. The Canadian information commissioner, for instance, noted in a speech on information management in the public sector in July 2004 that:

While the challenges were generally the same throughout the world, they were particularly difficult to address in lower resource environments, where awareness, professional capacity and financial resources were more limited.

Consequences for Africa of losing control of records

The consequences of this situation had a growing impact. In 2004, the World Bank manager for the E-Government Applications Group Informatics Program noted, ‘Without effective and efficient records management in place, the desired impact of financial and governance reforms is often minimal at best’.⁹ The same year, the head of Sierra Leone’s personnel management office noted:

In 2012, an article by staff from the University of Botswana noted, ‘The chaotic state of records and collapsing recordkeeping systems in most African countries makes it impossible to determine responsibility for official actions and to hold individuals accountable for their actions’.¹¹ Corruption investigators, prosecutors, regulators, auditors and lawyers all recognised the importance of being able to access reliable evidence of economic crimes, whether they involved tax fraud, payroll fraud, illicit financial flows, money-laundering, bribes, stolen assets or unauthorised allocations.

In 2013, the high costs of the records management gap in Africa were dramatically illustrated by two significant press reports. The New York Times noted that Sierra Leone’s 29 top health officials had been indicted by the government anti-corruption agency on charges of misappropriating funds from a global vaccine provider:

In Malawi, the BBC reported on ‘Cashgate’, the biggest financial scandal in the country’s history:

Regular warnings of the consequences of poor management of official records continued to appear in audit reports, anti-corruption investigations, expenditure tracking surveys, research reports and press reports. Still, donors and development planners generally felt that computerised systems offered the best basis for planning, monitoring and measuring national and international development goals and tended to believe that computer-generated information was different from records, even when it was the primary evidence of actions and transactions. The same debate went on in many parts of the world.¹⁴ The lack of awareness by key stakeholders, including senior managers, programme planners, IT staff, development planners and sometimes even records professionals, of the need to protect the integrity, authenticity and long-term accessibility of digital records, put governments at significant risk.

Digital records could be altered, fragmented, corrupted or deleted, either through malicious interference or through inadequate management. Computerised payrolls, for example, contained increasing amounts of inaccurate and incomplete data as payroll changes often were made on the basis of inaccurate or incomplete authorising evidence (paper or electronic), for instance, letters of appointment, promotion or transfer. When metadata, which should have described the context, content, structure and management of the records was not captured, was imprecise or became separated from the records as technology changed, the audit trail of changes to the payroll could not be verified. Far from solving the problem of ‘ghost workers’, computerised systems often added to them. Pino Akotia, at the University of Ghana, noted in 2013 that:

Governments and international organisations saw digitisation as a quick way to make records accessible and end dependence on paper records. By the 1980s, digitisation initiatives were widespread across Africa. Many development planners did not understand that management frameworks were needed to protect the digitised records and their integrity through time, just as they were for born-digital records. Many digitisation projects failed to incorporate requirements for legal admissibility, reliability and usability, such as metadata capture, image resolution, standardised indexes, classification structures, and retention and disposition schedules. As a result, digitised records were often difficult to retrieve, use and rely upon as legal evidence, leaving the creating agency and civil society at risk. For example, where the scan was poor or where the digital copies deteriorated through time, the legal value of the record was questionable. In some cases, when digitisation projects were introduced, the records were found to be in such disarray that records management teams had to be brought in to organise them before they could be digitised.

The rapid obsolescence of software and computer systems added to the risks. There is no doubt that the new technologies did help to streamline many processes. For instance, new tools and detection methods supported compliance monitoring and ongoing analysis of corruption risk through statistical, text mining and visual analysis. This did not, however, change the requirement to capture and preserve accurate evidence; just as in a paper environment, well-structured systems and training were essential to protecting the quality of the evidence. The World Bank’s 2016 World Development Report noted correctly that it is ‘fair to say that long-term preservation of digital records and information in most countries in the world is at serious risk’.¹⁶

Throughout this period, however, records professionals across the world continued to work steadily towards building international records and metadata standards, requirements and management tools for digital as well as paper records. Although this work was little known within the global development community, it was widely shared through the international records community, for instance through the International Council on Archives, the InterPARES Project¹⁷ and the International Records Management Trust, and gradually it had an impact on teaching programmes across Africa and elsewhere.

Open data and records management

From the 1990s, when public sector transparency, accountability and openness emerged as predominant international development themes, opening data to civil society was seen by many as a powerful way forward in facilitating sustainable development, making it possible to move beyond official secrets acts and lengthy closure rules.¹⁸ Open data can be used and reused immediately and freely, so long as it is attributed, does not refer to identifiable individuals and does not violate security restrictions. The benefits to using open data include improving economic performance, supporting human rights and making it possible for citizens to participate more fully in decision-making. Citizens can, for instance, use government data to track public expenditure against budgets, reuse it to support business development or track incidents of abuse.

However, inaccurate or incomplete data or otherwise flawed data can skew development findings, undermine confidence in government or endanger citizens’ rights. Incorporating records standards in open data schemes would make a significant contribution to strengthening data quality, accessibility and usability.

Conclusion

While data and statistics provide the essential basis for measuring the SDGs, records’ contribution in terms of documenting processes, protecting integrity and enabling preservation is also essential. High-quality records provide evidence of how data was created, when and why. They can verify where the data came from, how it was compiled, how it was used and how it was mapped together with other datasets to arrive at composite statistical findings. Records standards make it possible to extract, disaggregate, protect and preserve data, statistics and records documenting SDG measurements to 2030 and beyond. This audit trail is an essential aspect of the ability to trust and use data and statistics and to use them effectively.

As Africa grows increasingly dependent on digital information, it will be essential to ensure that the information created remains authentic, trustworthy and legally reliable for as long as it is needed. Building international standards into system design will go a long way towards ensuring that systems are capable of capturing and preserving quality records and data through time.¹⁹ Thirty years ago, records professionals in Africa faced apparently insurmountable challenges that they have worked hard to overcome. Today’s challenges are of a different nature. The continually evolving dynamics of using and managing digital information are immensely complex and cannot be solved by the records profession alone.

Today, the words data and records are often used interchangeably. What were traditionally called records now are often referred to as data. Hospital patients’ records are often referred to as disease data; records of births and deaths created through an official registration process are referred to as birth and death data; and records created to document the day-to-day activities of the state are referred to as administrative data. There are even references to open data records. Records now can be created in databases, outside the control of recordkeeping systems, and often no one is certain who is responsible for protecting and preserving them. What is their provenance? What is their context as part of an audit trail? Who decides? Who is responsible for ensuring that this is done? How long does the information need to survive? How is it to be stored? What happens when the technology with which it was created is upgraded or changed and what is the cost?

These challenges offer an opportunity to clarify the unique role that records play in defining sustainable development and in tackling global development issues that affect all people, everywhere. They point to the need to re-examine the relationship between data, statistics and records; to explore complementary standards, policies, practices, systems, structures, capabilities, technologies and tools for managing digital information. They underscore the need to articulate the unique and significant role that the records profession plays in making it possible to capture, document and protect evidence for accountability.

The data, statistics and records communities offer different but complementary approaches to creating and using information, making it vital that information professionals cooperate across the boundaries of their professions. New organisational alliances, for instance between national statistical offices and national archives, will have enormous benefits for measuring and achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. In the future, when most, if not virtually all, information is created and maintained in digital form, the quality, reliability, accessibility and longevity of data, statistics and records will be fundamentally important for meeting the challenges of sustainable development. Harmonising their contributions, without losing sight of their unique roles, will offer far greater opportunities for success than addressing them separately.