Official Statistics: moving towards data ownership in the future? Challenges and opportunities

Official statistics are produced by national statistical institutes or agencies or offices (NSOs). Despite institutional differences that are rooted in history and legal inheritance of countries, they are produced by public sector institutions, according to state needs, priorities, and choices. Despite being state products, independence of official statistics is critical. Nevertheless, it is a continuous struggle for NSOs, not only in Africa.

Official statistics must comply to international standards, including quality requirements, reduction of burden on respondents, protection of information on individuals, avoiding releasing data allowing recognizing a person, a household or a business. They provide data for policymaking and for policy evaluation, for the public debate as well as for monitoring the national economy and demographic changes.

In Africa, like elsewhere, NSOs are part of a wider national and international statistical ecosystem, guaranteeing quality, compliance to international standards, and exchanges of data and statistical capacities. International organizations and non-African NSOs contribute providing funding, training, sharing expertise and building capacities through international technical assistance programs. South South cooperation among African NSOs is also growing in recent years, as some of them have reached higher levels of development.

In Africa, NSOs have generally been created after Independence. In addition to being young institutions, they are often confronted to lack of regular funding, technical skills and too limited qualified staff to undertake their annual workplan. Furthermore, they are confronted to a series of other challenges impacting their effectiveness. The legal instruments, on which their legitimacy is based, have in many cases not been updated or they are not adapted to recent changes. Users cannot be properly involved in the decision-making mechanisms. If users do not trust the data produced or if they do not know their value added, levels of response to surveys are too low. In addition to these challenges, access to administrative data is not ensured: data matching is not always possible and easy in these conditions.

Given all these challenges, to which must be added deep historical differences between countries and institutions, official statistics are generally not comparable in Africa. NSOs across the continent do not produce regularly and timely the same or comparable data. For these reasons, official statistics have not yet been included in the IIAG.

Official statistics are a guarantee of quality and ownership for African countries. If, ideally, in the future the IIAG should be based only or mainly on official statistics, how to get to that point? Could the index contribute to regularly produce everywhere in Africa comparable data on critical issues? I hope that the IIAG Expert Panel will be able to provide a meaningful contribution to this extent.