Why Africa’s borderlands matter

Africa’s borderlands and their communities are a unique source of ingenuity, places of untapped opportunities and great resilience. In many of these regions, insecurity and poverty disguise the true socio-economic potential of borderlands and their communities. In improved circumstances, borderland communities could thrive by unlocking their potential and rich culture that will be critical to achieving Agenda 2030.

‘Borderlands’ are the territorial margins of nation-states – regions where border contact is a central feature of economic and political life. In Africa these regions play host to more than 270 million inhabitants, a combined population significantly larger than any single state on the continent.

Development approaches have tended to design programmes around national development plans, which are implemented within national borders and often overlook the unique challenges of borderlands and their connection to regions outside the national territory. The absence of dedicated borderland programming at a regional level has been a critical gap in developmental policy and practice.

The Borderlands Encyclopaedia

The Borderlands Encyclopaedia is a compendium of border pairs, borderland clusters, and key borderland details from across the Africa continent. It is dedicated to centrally collecting, preserving, documenting and harmonization of data, and to disseminate the harmonized data free of charge for comparison and decision making.

Vision

The Borderlands Encyclopaedia vision is to create a ‘one stop shop’ for accessing authoritative data on Africa borderlands to influence programmatic, innovation, research, and advocacy interventions.

Available Data

The Encyclopaedia captures basic borderlands data including but not limited to demographic, economic, social, conflicts, border closures and infrastructure. The source data is primarily from credible open sources and continuous updating is done to ensure that the data is current. Data quality assurance mechanisms include triangulation of data sources and data cleaning and validation processes to ensure accuracy, completeness, and integrity of data. Hyperlinks to the sources have been embedded for cross-reference and to credit the original data producers. The Encyclopaedia has an integrated dashboard to enhance interactive user experiences and data visualization. The data can be downloaded for advanced statistical analyses and modelling.

The Encyclopaedia will provide a platform to continuously share evidence, improve knowledge and information and will be a living repository of ethnographic information and borderlands stories. Data partnerships will play a catalytic role in expanding the Encyclopaedia scope through sharing of existing data and joint primary data gathering initiatives.

For a copy of the data file in Ms. Excel please email UNDP at: antony.mutungi@undp.org

Guidelines

Guidelines have been provided to help users to navigate through the Encyclopaedia portal and a feedback mechanism tool integrated to help in improvement of users’ experiences by flagging inconsistencies in data and suggesting additional data and information to include.

To access the guidelines click here