Plan to 'beef up' African stats
Shaun Benton
1 February 2006
Finance Minister Trevor Manuel has urged the heads of the statistical agencies of 42 African countries, including South African Statistician-General Pali Lehohla, to "beef up" their data ahead of a 2010 world programme on population and housing censuses.
Manueal was addressing the 2006 Africa Symposium on Statistical Development that opened at the International Convention Centre in Cape Town on Tuesday.
Saying, "if you can't measure it, you can't manage it", Manuel said political and economic leaders in Africa needed accurate statistics about the populations they led to effectively address the crisis of "wanton underdevelopment" in the continent.
Data quality
Last year, at a United Nations review of progress towards meeting the Millennium Development Goals - aimed primarily at halving poverty in the world by 2015 - concern was expressed at the quality of the data available from Africa, Manuel
said.
"How can we continue to lobby for the centrality of African development initiatives if the data we present has little credibility?" he asked the heads of the continent's statistical agencies.
"Secondly, how can we ask governments and donors to direct resources towards areas of need if we cannot empirically establish where the needs exist?"
African development
He warned that while 2005 was a year in which the needs of Africa took a high profile on the world stage, this might not continue to be the case.
"We must maintain African development initiatives at the international centre-stage, but we can't do it unless we have the data," the minister said.
A further problem is that Africa's poor reputation for collecting accurate data is getting worse, with the situation in decline.
"The concern is based on the fact that, for instance, 19 out of 56 countries and areas in Africa have not conducted a population census
in the last 10 years, nearly twice as many [countries] as in the previous decade."
Big challenge
Providing an even more damning account of Africa's poor track record on statistics, Manuel added: "The history of census-taking in Africa has been characterised by irregularity, incompleteness, inaccuracies and subsequently a gross under-utilisation of census data."
"If you can't rely on it, you can't use it," said the finance minister.
This has to change, he said, adding that reliable data collection has "got to be a big, big challenge for us".
The importance of population and housing censuses for decision-making and in monitoring progress towards national development goals "cannot be overstated".
According to Statistics South Africa, 89% of the world's population resides in a country that has conducted a census since 1995.
In Africa, only 52% of the population live in a country that has been through a census. This
compares with 99% for Europe and 95% for Asia.
Even for the remaining 48%, the data on their characteristics and their needs is not precise, says Stats SA.
Even the data on which the UN Millennium Development Goals are based is coming into question by experts, said Manuel, with attention focusing on "serious quality deficiencies".
Inadequate data, and in some cases no data at all, will ultimately undermine the progress of the continent towards meeting these important goals.
Key aim
That is besides the specific poverty reduction strategies by developing countries, which describe a specific macroeconomic, structural and social policy to be pursued and which are reinforced by an understanding informed by facts rooted in statistics.
If this understanding is unsound, "the programmes built on such foundations will be severely compromised", Manuel said.
With the United Nations-directed World Programme on Population and
Housing Censuses looming in 2010, all regions of the world have moved towards assessing their census experiences, with the exception of Africa, the conference delegates were told.
Concern at this resulted in the current meeting being organized in time for a report to be submitted to the UN Statistics Commission in March 2006.
A key aim of the current conference - being attended by the executive secretary of the UN Economic Commission for Africa, Dr Abdoulie Janneh, as well as the head of the UN's statistical division, Professor Paul Cheung - is to encourage all African countries to undertake a population and housing census in the 2010 round.
Other key objectives for the conference include fostering linkages between the Millennium Development Goals and census campaigns, and improving reporting between national and international statistical agencies.
Countries in Africa that are lagging behind need to be identified for a "special push to beef up their statistical
agencies", the finance minister said.
Source: BuaNews
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