BUSINESS REPORTER
The UN Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) is helping Zimbabwe and three other fragile states to come up with gender sensitive policies as it pushes for inclusivity.
Zimbabwe, alongside South Sudan, Mozambique and Burundi, are receiving capacity building for gender statistics and monitoring systems under a programme funded by the African Development Bank, Oliver Chinganya, director African Centre for Statistics in the ECA said on Tuesday.
“We are hopeful that you will see it engendered in the policies. It is a two-year programme and subject to funding, it will be expanded,” Chinganya said.
The capacity building ECA is providing to the quartet is part of its thrust to help Africa countries to modernise national statistics systems amid a huge demand for data.
African countries were stretched by the Covid-19 pandemic and could not carry out data collection and resources that were meant to beef up statistical offices were diverted to fight the pandemic.
This has left countries without credible statistics or some data missing.
Chinganya said Covid hit “us back tremendously” and “we are 10 years back” and had to find ways of leapfrogging using the latest methods.
But he underscored the need to provide credible statistics.
“This is why we end up paying much higher rates when we borrow outside because we are credible enough. The less transparent we are, the more we hurt ourselves. If you don’t have the numbers, you are not able to develop,” Chinganya said.
Chinganya said ECA is working on transformation and modernisation of national statistical systems in Africa.
He said three technical teams are working on the digitalisation and integration of data science initiatives with plans to use modern approaches to collect data. He said the transformation also looks at changes in the way data is collected. It also focuses on coordination of the national statistical system and statistical legislation (including administrative data systems and other sources.
The centre is modernising methods of data collection through Digital censuses that has seen the development and deployment of IT applications that improve the quality, timeliness and efficiency of data production in 6 countries—Nigeria, Zambia, Mauritius, Togo, Liberia and Seychelles.
It is also supporting tablet sharing among African countries in four countries—Togo, Gambia, Sierra Leone and Burundi and census planning support in Somalia.
