The United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) Wednesday launched a new program, aiming at supporting member states to modernize administrative data for statistical purposes.
The program follows the road map for transformation and modernizing official statistics in Africa, which was approved by the ECA’s Conference of Ministers of Finance and Economic Planning last week.
Two workshops are currently underway to kickstart the process in Cameroon and Uganda. The workshops are co-organized by ECA’s African Centre for Statistics (ACS) and national statistical offices in collaboration with the offices of the UN Resident Coordinators.
In a statement delivered on behalf of the UN system in Cameroon, Adama Coulibaly, Chief of the Sub Regional Initiatives Section at ECA’s Office for Central Africa, emphasized the need for national statistical systems to “transform and modernize to be more agile and resilient to crises” such as COVID-19.
“COVID-19 has shown that our statistical systems need to move away from current traditional ways of operating to be able to effectively support countries’ sustainable development and transformation agendas,” Coulibaly is quoted as saying.
MG/abj/APA