Data governance and standards

How ZEPRA is governed

ZEPRA is a national project information and delivery platform operating under a published methodology rather than case-by-case judgement. The following apply to every record on the platform, whoever commissioned it.

• Editorial and data decisions follow a published methodology rather than being taken case by case.
• A change to a project’s budget, status or publication state requires a second authorised officer, and nobody may approve their own change.
• Every correction carries the officer who made it and the reason given, and stays visible in the record’s history.
• Institutional agreements set what each partner publishes, on what terms, and how corrections are handled.

The operator statement sets out the legal entity behind ZEPRA, its registration details and the terms on which its information may be used.

How a record reaches the register

ZEPRA works with institutions that publish project, procurement and contract information, and brings what they publish into one national structure. A single infrastructure project is usually delivered through several tenders and several contracts, and ZEPRA keeps those attached to the project rather than scattered.

1. Information is obtained from the institution responsible for it, under the terms that institution sets.
2. Its origin is recorded with it — the institution, the original identifier, and when it was obtained.
3. Fields are validated and mapped to ZEPRA's national structure. A record that fails validation is held rather than published.
4. Institutions, locations, currencies, sectors and dates are normalised against ZEPRA's reference data.
5. Procurement processes and contracts are linked to the project they deliver. An uncertain link goes to a person, not to the register.
6. Published records show when they last changed, and their change history is kept rather than overwritten.

The full data quality methodology sets out the validation rules, the matching thresholds, the completeness scoring and the trust labels in detail. The source register lists every institution and system ZEPRA draws on, with the terms each applies.

What ZEPRA undertakes about its information

• An absent figure is shown as an em dash, never as zero and never as an estimate. A counted zero and an absence of data are different things.
• Obtaining a record is not the same as verifying it, and the labels on a record say which has happened.
• Physical completion is what the institution reported, carried with its basis and as-at date. It is never derived from how much money has been spent; financial completion is shown separately and labelled as a financial measure.
• A project is plotted on the map only where site coordinates were published. Otherwise the administrative area is shaded, and exports withhold coordinates entirely.
• “Not assessed” is not “on track”. They are distinct statuses and are filtered separately.
• One project has many tenders. A new procurement process never creates a new project record.
• A project identifier is issued once and never reused.
• Demonstration records are labelled wherever they appear and excluded from bulk downloads by default.

Standards ZEPRA follows

Standard	Applied to
Open Contracting Data Standard 1.1	The structure of a procurement process, from notice through award to contract.
OC4IDS 0.9	Project-level infrastructure information, and the link between one project and the several procurement processes that deliver it.
WCAG 2.2 level AA	Accessibility of every public page. See the accessibility statement.
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)	ZEPRA's own structuring, identifiers and annotations. Source records keep their publishing institution's terms.

Photography standard

ZEPRA shows real Zambian professionals at work. That is a rights question before it is a design question, so every photographic placement on the platform is a record in a permission register, and a photograph is published only once that record is complete and approved.

Each entry carries the image title, the photographer or institution, the original source, the licence or written permission relied on, any required credit, the date acquired, the people shown and their consent status, the project and location depicted, the alternative text, and the crop variants in use.

ZEPRA does not:

• Hotlink images from another organisation's servers.
• Assume an image may be reused because it appears on a public website.
• Use photographs taken from social media without a licence.
• Use AI-generated people.
• Present infrastructure from another country as Zambian.
• Use staged office-handshake photography or political rally imagery, or over-feature any individual office holder.
• Crop out required safety equipment, or show unfinished or unsafe works without context.

Where rights are not yet confirmed, the placement shows a marked internal placeholder and joins the photography approval list. Nothing unlicensed is published in the meantime, which is why parts of this site currently show a placeholder rather than a photograph.

Correcting a record

Anyone may request a correction — an institution, a contractor named in an award, a journalist, or a resident who can see that the project outside their home is further along than the record says.

1. The request is logged with what is disputed and the evidence offered.
2. A data steward checks it against the publishing institution's own record.
3. Where a change is made, it is recorded with the officer responsible and the reason, and stays visible in the record's history. Changes to budget, status or publication require a second authorised officer.
4. Where ZEPRA cannot establish a correction, the record can be marked as disputed so a reader sees the disagreement rather than only one side of it.