Work in Progress

National Data Inventories

An exercise using large language models to build a comprehensive database of public information systems in Africa.

• May 2025

• Version 1 of the database

• An explanation of the rationale and methodology.

Financing digital transformation in Africa

• September 2025

• A first attempt using Perplexity to develop a comprehensive mapping of investments into ICT infrastructure, digital transformation and digital public infrastructures between 2015 and 2025. It covers domestic and international investments from all sources.

• A summary of key findings

• The database is presented (downloadable xslx) here as produced by Perplexity. the only changes that have been made are the cleaning of names. It contains 1,464 records from 54 countries.

• The methodology explains how Perplexity was trained for the task through two iterations and an explanation of the expected accuracy of the data.