05 Sep 2016

Statistics Botswana statistician general, Ms Anna Majelantle says celebrating 50 years is a major milestone.

Speaking at the Statistics Botswana’s BOT50 dinner on Friday, Ms Majelantle said over the last 50 years, the office went through developmental changes, experiencing both bad and good times along the journey.

“For example, in September 1982, the office suffered a blow when it was gutted by fire. During that period, the organisation strove bravely and tirelessly against numerous obstacles to keep the office properly for the welfare of its employees and upkeep of its mandate,” she said.

On some of the achievements, in 2009 the office restructured to a parastatal, adding that guaranteed them independence in implementing their mandate.

She added that the move also brought their office governance in line with evolving best practices around the world.

The office, she said, remained dynamic in a fast changing statistical environment.

“We constantly rethink our tools, systems and responses. We have had to look continuously at our business model from the process-driven to a customer focused organisation,” she said.

Former government statistician, Mr Guest Charumbira, highlighted that every country’s development plan required quality and timely statistics to monitor and measure progress made in its development efforts.

As such, Mr Charumbira said the statistics community also took pride in the independence of its data.

He added that such had also made provisions towards the important element, hence the statistics produced made no favour to any political alignment.

On some of the changes that took place over the years and the improvement in the statistics process value chain, he said every country prided itself in the development and planning processes that were supported by clear facts.

Therefore, he said statistics were handy for providing such facts especially towards informed decision making, monitoring and evaluation process.

“This has proved to be the case in the development of statistics in Botswana over time,” he added.

Mr Charumbira explained that the Central Statistics Office (CSO), as Statistics Botswana was previously known, was set up through the 1967 Statistics Act Cap 17:01 and 17:02.

At the time, he said CSO was a unit under planning division in the Ministry of Finance and Development Planning.

“Later, efforts were eventually made by the ministry to expand operations of the unit to transform it to a department.  Since then, Botswana’s core mandate was essentially to coordinate the provision of all official statistics in accordance with internationally recognised frameworks, methodologies and practices and had remained the same,” he said.

Meanwhile, the dinner also included the launch of Statistics Botswana’s revamped website and Service Charter.

The website demonstrates the organisation’s responsiveness to communication and statistical information sharing initiatives, whilst the Charter demonstrates the seriousness it attached to turnaround time in statistics service delivery.

Further, the event was meant to commemorate Botswana’s 50th anniversary of independence and Statistics Botswana’s existence as an official statistics service provider.

It also reflected on the organisation’s statistics journey over the past five decades, as a statistics provider to appreciate statistics development and various contributions made overtime. ENDS