Seventh Statistical Commission for Africa (StatCom-Africa VII)

By ECA

Date: 24 Octobre 2020

Held for the first time using a virtual platform, the Seventh Statistical Commission for Africa was organized under the theme “Developing regional solutions as a contribution to enhancing resilience of African National Statistical Systems to meet the Decade of Action data needs in global pandemic context”. It took place from Tuesday 13 to Thursday 15 October 2020.

Attended by more than 200 participants, the 7th Statistical Commission for Africa was organized amidst the call of the Eval4Action campaign for all actors everywhere to accelerate the delivery of Sustainable Development Goals, by advocating for stronger evaluation capacities and evidence-based policies. With only ten years left to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals, the United Nations Secretary-General is asking everyone to mobilize an ambitious and urgent Decade of Action to deliver the Goals by 2030. This is further echoed in the Secretary-General’s Data Strategy for Action by Everyone, everywhere announced in April 2020.

Further, the Covid-19 pandemic in conjunction with the need to inform development policies towards the achievement of global, regional and sub-regional agendas have engendered severe challenges to the collection, production and dissemination of economic, social and environmental statistics. To tackle the pandemic impact at regional level, a couple of initiatives have been taken by the UN agencies, through the Opportunity-Issue Based Coalitions (OIBCs), including a better coordination of their statistical support to efficiency use the scarce resources allocated to statistical development and to ensure continuous availability of data for measuring progress towards SDGs achievement.

Despite the ongoing context of Covid-19 global pandemic, African countries remain committed to the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and, particularly to the 2063 Agenda for regional integration and its specific agendas including the Continental Free Trade Area.

For statisticians, this crisis time require innovative and pragmatic statistical solutions to meet the need to make available reliable and high-quality data on a timely basis.

An assessment conducted in March 2020 on statistical activities of African national statistical offices highlighted the following major impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic:

• Data collection operations have been significantly hampered. Twenty-five per cent of surveys that had been planned (i.e., 42 of 168) have been either halted or suspended, and a further 48 surveys have been postponed;
• Even where operations are ongoing, higher non-responses rates and low sample coverage have been observed. Furthermore, 22 per cent of planned population and housing census activities have been either halted or suspended;
• There has been greater demand for data and supporting activities. National statistical systems, in particular national statistical offices, have been overwhelmed by requests for data, statistical services and information.

In the light of the aforementioned impacts, it was essential to find adequate solutions to the challenges arising from the pandemic and to fast-track the implementation of programs to achieve global and regional agendas.  Given the extent to which the expansion of the COVID-19 pandemic has marked every aspect of socioeconomic development, the meeting highlighted the key challenges faced while implementing statistical programs and operations in this context, along with measures for effectively dealing with those challenges.

The 7^th StatCom-Africa came up with innovative statistical solutions to keep strengthened National Statistical Systems to the view of informing decision makers on economic, social and environmental situation in real time.

As a subsidiary body of ECA, StatCom-Africa endorsed and provided guidance on ECA statistical program so as to align it with the statistical requirements engendered by the COVID-19. Further, the key expected accomplishments of the 7th StatCom-Africa were:

• Ownership of methodologies: African statistical system actors will discuss how to adapt to local conditions methodologies that have been developed at the global level (in particular those discussed during recent sessions of the United Nations Statistical Commission) and will adopt regional positions on some matters;
• Harmonization of methodologies: Effective guidance will be given on statistical concepts, methods and standards to support governments and regional institutions in the production, use and dissemination of high-quality statistics in support of development efforts;
• COVID-19 pandemic impact mitigation: Appropriate methodologies to mitigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic will be identified;
• Greater knowledge of partnership opportunities: Partners will share with participants their respective initiatives to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals during the present Decade of Action.

The StatCom-Africa meeting was delivered in plenary sessions. Simultaneous interpretation in English and French languages were provided.

The official country delegation to the StatCom-Africa were led by the head of the National Statistics Office. Given the objective of the meeting, representatives of Agricultural statistical systems, health statistical systems, education statistical systems, civil registration systems and Statistical Training Centres were invited. Other observers from national, sub-regional, regional and international organizations, Inter-governmental Organizations, NGOs, the academia and research institutions, the private sector and related industries were invited to attend.