When Tahiru Mahama began compiling public health data on malaria in rural Ghana, he expected to find troubling trends. What he didn’t expect was the complete absence of data.

“Entire communities weren’t showing up,” he recalls. “It was like they didn’t exist.” That moment would shape his work and mission for years to come.

From electoral registers to disease tracking systems, missing data isn’t just an administrative hiccup; it’s a denial of existence. Mahama, who grew up in northern Ghana and later studied biostatistics in the U.S., has made it his goal to highlight these silent absences.

“When you’re not in the data, you’re not in the policy,” he says. “You’re not in the funding, and you’re not in the plans.”

In his graduate research, Mahama applied nonparametric models to uncover “ghost zones” in national statistics — areas where schools, clinics, and even births were not accurately recorded.

Part of the problem, he believes, is the global development industry’s reliance on Western-designed tools and methodologies. “We’re using models meant for orderly, digitised systems to understand regions that have neither the infrastructure nor the history those systems assume,” he says.

Mahama once tracked a region of 25,000 people where health data hadn’t been updated in five years. Upon visiting, he discovered that community nurses were still manually recording cases on carbon paper.

“They told me, ‘We send the reports, but no one picks them up,’” he says. “It wasn’t a lack of effort. It was a system that stopped listening.”