This is the BBC.

Hello and welcome to more or less on the BBC World Service.

We're your weekly guide to the numbers all around us in the news and in life,

and I'm Tim Harford.

This week the numbers behind life and death decisions in developing countries.

How reliable are they and is the most being made of the data.

Clermil Ahmed is the Executive Director of the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development

Data and she is ready after two decades working on data in

development to let all of us into a secret.

There is something of an iron law of development research which means that whenever two or more

researchers get together at some point they start to complain about how terrible the data is.

This has been a little bit of a dirty secret in development for a long time and the fact that many of the numbers on which

we do research or on which people campaign are a bit shaky. Claire says there are

two ways to take this problem on.

One is to get better data.

The other is to use existing data in a smarter way.

So we need someone smart.

In the senior high school, some of my friends

begin to call me professor, professor.

This is Justice Ahito.

Actually, I should give him his proper title,

Doctor Justice Ahito. After all, his old friends might be tuning in.

...