08 Aug 2017

African National Statistics Offices and Development Partners continue to collaborate in the development and implementation of statistics framework and strategies to provide expertise and skills for the improvement of various sector statistics.

Speaking at the training of trainers workshop on effective use of Food Balance Sheet (FBS) for Agriculture, Statistics, statistician general recently, Ms Anna Majelantle said that the Global Strategy to improve agricultural and rural statistics was established and endorsed by the UN Statistical Commission in February 2010.

She said the objective of the strategy was to provide a framework that would help improve the availability and quality of statistics on agriculture and food security in the world.

She said member states had a responsibility to provide statistical information to support national, regional as well as global agenda.

She however cited that there were some challenges regarding provision of quality statistics among which were challenges of expertise and skills in specific sector statistics.

Ms Majelantle noted that the main objective of this training workshop was to equip participants with competencies necessary for training others with skills for producing and using agricultural statistics.

She said more specifically, the training would focus on newly developed methods for constructing and effectively using FBS for agricultural statistics.

She said FBS were the main source of data used in the assessment and appreciation of the world food situation and they were also suitable in estimating the overall food shortages or surplus in a country.

“They are useful in developing projections of future food supply and demand as well as evaluating national food and nutrition policies,” she said, adding that FBS provided sound baseline data for policy analysis and decision-making needed to ensure food security.

She said they expected the workshop to result with better understanding of the requirements for producing and using FBS to enhance statistics on agriculture and to improve physical scope of official statistics by mainstreaming agricultural statistics within the national statistical systems of Africa.

On the other hand, she said this would ultimately result in an enhanced capacity of African national statistical systems that produced and disseminated high quality agricultural statistics. ENDS