Why is Central Africa missing from so many maps? - Quartz
▻http://qz.com/609107/africas-largest-mobile-operator-has-hired-eric-holder-to-take-on-the-nigerian-go
▻https://qzprod.files.wordpress.com/2016/01/wapo3.png?w=1600
Missing statistics are not the only problem. Measures must also be accurate enough to form the basis for effective policy. Many of the published statistics for African countries are known to be based on flawed or incomplete sources. According to Morton Jerven, an economist who has published two books about problems with African statistics, “Presidents are elected, rejected and reelected on the promise of creating more jobs, yet most of these presidents would not have the faintest idea of how big unemployment is, whether [it] is going up or down, or even where people work or where they want to work.”
Economics are probably where bad data has been the most visible. In his 2013 book, Poor Numbers, Jerven lists many deficiencies in African states’ national accounting. The very next year revisions to GDP calculations in some of those countries found that they they were off by as much as half. Most Central African countries have not yet aligned their national accounts to global standards and are likely to be subject to similarly skewed statistics.
Problems are by no means limited to the data published within the countries. The United Nations’ oft trumpeted Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are a particularly dramatic illustration. These goals are evaluated using local statistical indicators, such as childhood immunization rates and the percentage of residents with mobile phones. They drive development efforts around the world, but nowhere more than in Sub-Saharan Africa. When local data is not available, the UN fills in the gaps. In 2015, 65% of the MDG indicators for Central African countries were either estimated, derived from statistical models, or were last measured prior to 2010.