{"id":2092,"date":"2019-01-05T15:40:34","date_gmt":"2019-01-05T15:40:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/britsimonsays.com\/?p=2092"},"modified":"2019-01-05T15:40:45","modified_gmt":"2019-01-05T15:40:45","slug":"dv2019-ceac-data-af-region-sneak-peek","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/britsimonsays.com\/dv2019-ceac-data-af-region-sneak-peek\/","title":{"rendered":"DV2019 CEAC data AF region sneak peek"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I am very proud of the community of people we have here. As a community, there are people all over the world solving captchas for the benefit of all of us. I’m humbled and impressed to be connected to you all in that way. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It’s important that we finish the initial scrape of data as soon as possible. We want to get the data as a “point in time”. The initial results show for the first time what are the highest case numbers in each region, and show the holes that affect the “density” of cases within a region. Some people won’t understand what I mean by density, but I have explained this previously. For DV2016 I published a series of articles that explained that in detail. You can start to read those articles here<\/a>. In simple terms though if you were case number 1000 in a given region, you might think there are 999 cases in front of you. That will not be the case, since there are “holes” which are case numbers without any real case attached. These are cases that were removed before the winners were announced, either because the cases were disqualified (duplicate entries, invalid country selections etc) or the country was stopped because there were already “enough” winners from that specific country. That makes more sense when you understand the draw process, which you can read about here<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now, as I mentioned in my last blog post I was hoping I would wake up this morning and find that AF region was completed. It is. So I am going to show you the chart from Xarthisius that shows all the cases for AF region. I will also show you the same view from DV2018 and DV2015 to show the differences. I have data going back several years, but the charts that Xarthisius has produced illustrate the data very well . <\/p>\n\n\n\n

So – first of all, here is the chart for DV2019 AF region. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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DV2019 AF region CEAC data<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

So – what does that show? Well first of all we can see there are no case numbers above 2019AF48XXX. So – if you have a number in that final range you now know you are at the back of the line. But another important finding is the holes. The holes are in blue on the graph above. You can see the holes rate starts at about 30 – 35% on average, meaning that each one thousand case numbers only has around 600 to 700 actual cases. The holes rate increases after about 20000, which happens as countries become “limited”. These countries are countries such as Ghana, Egypt, Ethiopia and DRC Congo. Remember I am talking about countries limited for SELECTEES – this does NOT necessarily mean they will be limited for visas to be issued. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now, let’s look at the contrast with DV2018 and DV2015.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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DV2018 AF region CEAC data<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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DV2015 AF region CEAC data<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

In the other charts (which are available on Xarthisius’ site<\/a> along with the full data set for download) we can see that the starting holes rate in previous years was closer to 20%. That is the case for several years (DV2018, DV2017, DV2016, DV2015 and DV2014 at least). So – there has been a sudden increase in the holes rate. A sudden increase in cases disqualified before the winners were announced. That is very significant. I cannot be certain why that would be the case, but I can speculate the following possibilities:<\/p>\n\n\n\n