information. As a result, the farmers have been able to cut trader margins by half and increase their revenue (Vaitla et al. 2015c).

When governments make their data available in a machine-readable format, the possible uses of the data expand, and correspondingly, so do their value. A recent policy evaluation looked at the impact of a Senegalese law reducing the length of pre-trials on the quality of decisions. The law was implemented to increase court efficiency, which has been shown to matter for economic development. One could fear that such an efficiency reform would deteriorate the quality of the judgments. Through a laborious effort of digitalizing case-level data from the court, the impact evaluation found this not to be the case and that firms benefitted from the faster process times, suggesting that the reform indeed worked as intended (Kondylis and Stein 2018). In this way, making data machine-readable could assure that past policy changes were appropriate.

Because of these benefits, the signaling value of being a country that makes data widely available can help countries reduce their sovereign bond spreads, decrease their external debt burden, and foster growth. If African countries could raise their level of data transparency to the level of the top quartile of upper middle-income countries, the region as a whole would save 4.87 basis points in sovereign bond spreads and decrease their external debt by more than 400 million dollars (Kubato and Zeufack 2020). Another study finds that <mark>data transparency has a positive and sizable effect on real gross domestic product per capita (Islam and Lederman 2020)</mark> . These findings and the examples above reveal that collecting and disseminating data should not be viewed as a drain on public finances.

# **Understandability**

Data accessibility is often not enough to ensure that data are used by governments or individuals when the data are difficult to understand or there is a lack of skills to understand how to use the data. One example where data only attained its value when it was understood properly relates to public procurement. Too often, public projects are not implemented adequately due to poor procurement, such as inflated costs, corruption, or ghost contracts. Since 12 percent of global GDP is spent on public procurement, this matters tremendously for development outcomes (Bosio and Djankov 2020). In Uganda, in an attempt to improve procurement outcomes, local government entities made administrative procurement data from the bidding process down to the execution of contracts available to certain Civil Society Organizations (CSOs). Such data are not easily comprehendible to a non-trained audience, so the CSOs trained community members to understand the information in the contracts and conduct site checks to verify it. The findings revealed mismanagement of resources by contractors and government officials and high dependence on noncompetitive contracts. Aside from the direct benefits of assuring that contracts complied with national procurement standards, the national public procurement agency upgraded its procurement portal in line with international open contracting data standards, making Uganda the first African country to do so (Africa Freedom of Information Centre 2018 and Global Partnership for Social Accountability 2020).

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