Should African countries pursue reconnection with the Diaspora? Visualizing Ghana’s Year of Return
By: Muoyo Okome
Tags: Ghana, Africa, Data Science, Data, Data Visualization

Source: CNN

Over the course of 2019, Ghana’s “Year of Return” activities made numerous appearances across my social media timelines, culminating in an action-packed, star-studded, FOMO-inspiring December for the ages. When I learned that these efforts had boosted their economy by $1.9 billion (source: Face 2 Face Africa), I felt a sense of excitement and inspiration, and also wondered what it could mean for other African nations, such as my mother country Nigeria. Should they be following suit?

Our key question today: Should other African countries be emulating Ghana’s Year of Return strategy?

Source: Face 2 Face Africa

The answer is obviously yes, right? As in all things, it depends…

For one thing, we first need to get a better sense of how much a success it was. $1.9 billion is a huge number, but what does it look like in context? If we compare $1.9 billion to the current contents of my bank account, it looks enormous, while next to the market value of a Microsoft, Apple, or Amazon, it might seem less so.

That is the purpose of this blog post. Plus, what better opportunity to practice some data science skills and have some fun with visualizations?

But before we attempt to answer that question, let’s take a step back, into a story that begins 400 years ago… (well actually far longer)

What is the Year of Return?

The “Year of Return, Ghana 2019” is a major landmark spiritual and birth-right journey inviting the Global African family, home and abroad, to mark 400 years of the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in Jamestown, Virginia. The arrival of enslaved Africans marked a sordid and sad period, when our kith and kin were forcefully taken away from Africa into years of deprivation, humiliation and torture. While August 2019 marks 400 years since enslaved Africans arrived in the United States, “The Year of Return, Ghana 2019” celebrates the cumulative resilience of all the victims of the Trans Atlantic slave Trade who were scattered and displaced through the world in North America, South America, the Caribbean, Europe and Asia.

…

We are focused on ensuring that our brothers and sisters have a safe, pleasant and wonderful journey home so they will want to come back, get involved, see the opportunity that exists in Ghana for us to work together and begin to rebuild what has been stolen and lost over the past 400 years. -Year of Return, Ghana 2019

That sounds amazing. So how did it go?

Source: CNN

Not so fast…

While you and I both want to get to the sexy charts & graphs I promised, before doing that, it’s important to have an honest conversation about what this analysis is and what it isn’t, and what claims we can actually make from it. Particularly in this age of fake news and alternative facts, where information can travel across the world in seconds, anything else would be irresponsible.

The headline figure of $1.9 billion originates from a quote by Ghana’s Tourism Minister:

“Ghana’s economy generated a total of $1.9 billion through activities related to the ‘Year of Return’, according to Tourism Minister Barbara Oteng-Gyasi.

She said: ‘There has been tremendous community involvement which has stimulated the local economy including hoteliers, tour operating and other related businesses.’” — Face 2 Face Africa

The data I was able to track down for Ghana’s tourism receipts comes from the World Bank, covering the years 1995-2017, but not 2018 or 2019. Here is how they describe the data provided:

International tourism receipts are expenditures by international inbound visitors, including payments to national carriers for international transport. These receipts include any other prepayment made for goods or services received in the destination country. They also may include receipts from same-day visitors, except when these are important enough to justify separate classification. For some countries they do not include receipts for passenger transport items. Data are in current U.S. dollars.

While the World Bank provides a thorough of how their figures are calculated, our $1.9 billion figure for 2019 comes without much further detail, meaning there is a high probability we are not comparing apples to apples and cannot make any authoritative declarations.

Such is life. This is the real world, and we don’t always have access to every piece of data we want. Rather than be deterred, let’s acknowledge the weaknesses in the model, state our assumptions, and do the best we can with the available data.

This is a starting point. When I get my hands on more complete data, we’ll dive deeper and continue to get closer to the truth. Ghana, Nigeria, Botswana, holler at me. All comers are welcome :)

It’s also an opportunity to practice our data exploration and visualization skills, and hopefully inspire at least one of you reading to fall in love with data science the way I have.

And with the ground rules in place, let’s have some fun…

Success of the Campaign

Wow. This is a great start!

While continuing to acknowledge the limitations in rigor of our $1.9 billion figure, to the extent we can rely on the number, it represents a huge leap forward.

Ghana’s international tourism receipts had grown rapidly and steadily over the past 25 years, peaking in 2012 at $1.15 billion before declining to $919 million in 2017, meaning that $1.9 billion would represent more than double 2017’s receipts.

We can’t get a better quality answer to our question without improving the precision of our data, but I think there’s more room to have fun.

What about 2018? Dealing with Missing Data

Well this is awkward… due to the challenges of data collection, the World Bank does not provide update this dataset in real time or close to real time. We’ve used the Minister’s assertion to estimate 2019, but what about 2018? We’ve got nothing.

While not having 2018 doesn’t affect the crux of our analysis one way or another, it might be nice to show a value for that on our graph, plus it gives us another opportunity to play.

Data scientists deal with missing data on an everyday basis. Sometimes the solution is to drop that part of the data, removing it from consideration. Other times the answer is imputation, or substituting replacement values based on inferences we can draw from the data we do have (yes, we are making it up… but in a way that makes some sense :)). Depending on the situation, it might make sense to impute the mean, the median, zero, or the word “missing”.

In this case, I’ve tested several different possibilities including mean, median, and interpolation, eventually settling on the mean receipts from 2012–2017, since when looking at the numbers, those years appear to be part of the same trend. Using this strategy yields an imputed value of $934.5 million, which seems relatively plausible for a made up number.

Another reasonable option would have been using the mean receipts from 2005–2017, which would have given us a similar result of $927.8 million.

The Road to $8.3 Billion

In 2012, Ghana’s government released a 15-year National Tourism Development Plan which projects that tourism receipts will surpass 8.3 billion per year by 2027.

While none of us can definitively say whether or not the goal will be achieved, I absolutely do know it will be fun to visualize, so let’s do it.

While it would be silly for us to assume that the growth would happen in a perfectly straight line, as I’ve visualized above, it is still interesting to observe the relative relationship in scale to get a sense of what kind of growth we are talking about.

The Growth of Arrivals

According to data from ‘The Year of Return’ Secretariat in the first nine months of 2019, there have been 80,862 more arrivals from the United States of America, the United Kingdom, and other key target nations than the figure recorded the previous year. The figures showed that in-bound airport arrivals from the United States of America increased by 26 percent (17,455) and the United Kingdom by 24 percent (9,812). An official noted, “Total airport arrivals have increased by 45 percent (237,088), compared to last year.” — Face 2 Face Africa

While the World Bank only reports the official arrivals figures through 2015, leaving us without 2016–2019, we can see that Ghana has been on the right track with their tourism policy, with arrivals showing a steady upward trend.

However given that arrivals were 897,000 in 2015, a gain of 72,000 over 2014, a single-year increase of 237,000 represents an absolutely phenomenal leap.

Revenue per arrival, on the other hand, showed no such clear trend in the past years. I would be curious to see how this metric fared in the Year of Return.

Tourism’s Place in the Ghana Economy

While tourism has continued to grow in recent years, Ghana’s overall exports have grown much faster, and by 2017 tourism receipts made up just 4.5% of total exports (down from a high of 22% in 2005). Ghana’s top exports are gold, cocoa beans, and timber products, in addition to tuna, aluminum, manganese ore, diamonds, and horticulture

It would be interesting to know if this percentage was impacted by Year of Return activities, but either way, it is clear that boosting Ghana’s tourism remains a key focus.

In Conclusion

It’s clear that Ghana’s Year of Return has been a hugely successful & impactful campaign other nations would be wise to learn from.

Still, many questions remain to explore, such as:

How do Ghana’s tourism receipts and their growth compare to other African countries?

How do Ghana’s tourism receipts and their growth compare to countries of a similar size?

Have there been any unexpected effects/consequences associated with Year of Return activities?

and more…

However, given that this is a blog post and not a book, I’ll end things here for now.

If you’d like to see more, demand it by leaving a comment.

If you have the data I am looking for, or other data I can help you to explore, feel free to get in touch.

If you have any questions on the tools & techniques used, or anything I’ve done, let me know in the comments and I am happy to help.

Til the next time!