The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) has launched five simultaneous technical workshops in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, aimed at overhauling how the bloc’s member states collect, harmonise, and share statistical data, with one session breaking new ground by exploring the use of mobile phone call records as a source of economic indicators.
The workshops, running from March 2 to 13, 2026, are organised by the Research and Statistics Directorate of the ECOWAS Commission within the framework of the Harmonisation and Improvement of Statistics in West and Central Africa Project (PHASAOC), a World Bank-funded initiative aligned with ECOWAS Vision 2050. They run alongside a high-level regional consultation on the future direction of the bloc, which is preparing for a Special Summit of Heads of State and Government.
The most technically ambitious of the five sessions focuses on Detailed Call Records (DCR), the raw data generated by mobile network activity. Participants are developing methodologies for converting that data into publishable statistical indicators, while also establishing the legal and ethical frameworks that would govern its use and defining how National Statistical Institutes across the region would collaborate with telecommunications operators. The initiative responds to a structural challenge facing many West African countries: traditional household surveys are expensive, slow, and sometimes incomplete, while mobile penetration across the region now exceeds 50 percent of the population in most member states, making call records a potentially rich, near-real-time data source.
A second workshop is tackling a more immediately practical problem: ensuring that consumer price indices across member states are genuinely comparable. The session focuses on implementing the methodological guide for the Harmonized Index of Consumer Prices (HICP), with particular attention to sampling techniques. Without harmonised price data, regional inflation comparisons and monetary policy coordination remain unreliable, a persistent weakness in the ECOWAS statistical architecture.
The remaining three workshops address demographic projection methodologies, the Open Data Platform version 2 (ODP2) and Statistical Data and Metadata Exchange (SDMX) interoperability standards, and a Construction Materials Index (CMI) harmonisation exercise being finalised by a dedicated Technical Working Group. The ODP2 session includes collaboration with the African Development Bank on the digital transformation of statistical systems.
ECOWAS Commissioner for Economic Affairs and Agriculture Dr. Kalilou Sylla said the workshops represent a deliberate effort to move from aspiration to implementation. “The engagement of National Statistical Institutes in implementing harmonisation programmes forms the foundation of the region’s ambition for deeper statistical integration,” he said at the launch ceremony on March 2.
The outcomes of the workshops are expected to feed into monitoring frameworks for the African Union’s Agenda 2063, the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals Agenda, and ECOWAS Vision 2050, all of which depend on comparable, high-quality data from member states to track progress meaningfully.
