Practical techniques OPEN GOVERNMENT STATISTICS Governments collect data to inform decision‑making and planning. There is a push for governments to open their data to the public to increase transparency, accountability and citizen engagement. Examples of open data initiatives are on the rise worldwide, including online portals Accessing government data A large amount of secondary data is publicly available on national bureaus of statistics websites. Additionally, many agencies publish and apps for citizens to access relevant government-programme evaluations online. government data for their own use. These Where data is not available online, you may be sources can provide a wealth of relevant information for human rights researchers, but also poses challenges. able to submit a freedom of information request. More than 95 countries recognise a general right to access government information, with exceptions for information deemed too sensitive to share. Read more at: http://right2info.org/. Downloading, storing and organising government data Government data is often presented in PDF format, making data searching and analysis challenging. The School of Data has tutorials on how to extract data from a PDF, so that you can work in a user-friendly and familiar format like CSV or XLSX. 40