Observatoire Economique et Statistique d’Afrique Subsaharienne

Activities of the Strategic Support and Distribution Department (DASD)

Introduction

The distinctive feature of theStrategic Support and Distribution Department (DASD) is to provide technical support to the General Directorate as well as to the Member State national statistical institutes.It collaborates with other departments in almost all their activities.

i. DASD Missions and Areas of Involvement

The Strategic Support and Distribution Department (DASD) has the following missions:

  • bringing institutional support to Member States, especially for preparing and monitoring/assessing statistical development strategies;
  • implementing an information technology policy for the General Directorate, especially for new application monitoring technology and development;
  • implementing the General Directorate communications strategy;
  • helping AFRISTAT Member States to strengthen their capabilities in automated data processing, documentation and publications;
  • contributing to improvement of Member State statistical information distribution and use by helping them to implement national data banks available to different economic and social agents;
  • implementing and managing General Directorate data banksavailable to different regional economic and social agents;
  • ensuring the material coordination of AFRISTAT publications with the Administrative and Financial Service.

The Strategic Support and Distribution Department includes a documentation and publication centre.Under a Centre Head, the Documentation and Publications Centre is responsible for:

  • management of works produced or acquired by AFRISTAT as well as the library;
  • monitoring of the AFRISTAT publication production process and partner relations in this area.

The Department currently includes:

  • a headstrategic organisation expert, as department coordinator;
  • an institutional organisation and statistical systems expert;
  • two information systems experts;
  • a communications coordinator and Documentation Centre Head;
  • an assistant economist statistician, responsible for statistical data collection and distribution;
  • a reprography agent.

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II.Main Activities Over the Past Decade

The Department’s main activities may be classed in four (4) groups:(i) organisation and institution, (ii) information technology, (iii) distribution and communication, (iv) training.

II.1. Organisational and Institutional Issues

Concerning the strengthening of Member Stateinstitutional capabilities, support covers:

  • preparation, review and monitoring/assessment of national statistical development strategies (SNDS);
  • preparation of annual activity programmes and national statistical institute (NSI) reports;
  • preparation or review of legislative or regulatory provisions on national statistical systems (SSN);
  • support for NSI institutional changes;
  • support for SSN peer reviews;
  • organisation and conduct of producer/user encounters;
  • adoption of the Quality approach;
  • training of NSI managers for data quality assessment;
  • teaching on institutional and organisational issues.

II.2. Information Technology

Information technology has an important place in DASD’s responsibilities.These activities concern building and developing AFRISTAT and Member State infrastructures, supplying equipment and software and human resources training.

  • General Directorate Infrastructures:Infrastructures needed for employee work and information system implementation were in place very early.Since 2000, secured networks (information technology and electrical) have been installed, allowing users to share resources.Next, the General Directorate developed and put its website online, set up an electronic mail service and developed its intranet.
  • Equipment and Software Supply to Member State NSIs:AFRISTAT has provided equipment and statistical software to countries in connection with the certain project implementations.It concerned mainly regional projects AFRISTATled for sub-regional economic integration organisations.
  • Information Technology Network Installation and Optimisation:AFRISTAT has helped Member States ininformation technology network installation and optimisation to allow NSI agents to share material, software and Internet resources, and to better manage equipment and statistical data.AFRISTAT has also provided technical support improving security (anti-virus and electrical) of NSI information technology installations (France-ECOWAS project).

II.3. Distribution and Communication

  • Statistical Information Distribution Improvement:AFRISTAT support has allowed website implementation for most of the national statistical institutions of the Member States and the ECOWAS (France-ECOWAS project), data banks for censuses and surveys for archiving and data bases for socioeconomic information distribution and automatic short-term data publication, etc.

With World Bank and Paris21 support, AFRISTAT has backed the NSIs in adopting tools promoted by the international household survey network, IHSN, for documentation and data archiving (Data Management Toolkit) and putting national survey catalogues online (NADA).

In addition, with the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA),AFRISTAT has trained certain NSI managers in using the Integrated Data Management System (REDATAM/IMIS) as a data bank for surveys and censuses that can be distributed on the Internet.

AFRISTAT also promotes other tools for validating statistical data with other technical and financial partners:StatBase, DevInfo, CensusInfo.

  • Geographic Information Systems:AFRISTAT has also trained statisticians and demographers in geographic information systems for cartography and thematic analysis with specific software such as PhilCarto and MapInfo, Adobe Illustrator, etc.
  • Publication Distribution:the DASD prepares and distributesAFRISTAT publications.These publications concern the Bulletin Officiel, the Etat des INS, the “Méthodes”, “Etudes” and“Annuaires” series, the AFRISTATnewsletter and various other publications.
  • AFRISTAT Website Management and Updating:the DASD is the main player in management of the website, AFRISTAT's showcase (
  • AFRISTAT Institutional Communication:the DASD conducts all the General Directorate’s communication activities.It includes organisation of statutory meetings, communication campaigns, press release production, press relations, flyer production, reporting on visits and meetings of the General Directorate with its partners, promotional materials production, etc.
  • National Statistical Institute Institutional Communication:AFRISTAT and Cefil completed a project between 2008 and 2011 to train Member State executives in online writing to better communicate on statistical analyses.

II.4. Training

The activities to strengthen human resources capabilities concern initial training and continuing education. They consist especially of:

  • teaching missions with training schools;
  • preparation of continuing education programmes for SSN statisticians;
  • preparation of training modules for non-statistician management working in SSNs;
  • organisation of common entrance examinations in the Abidjan, Dakar and Yaoundéschools;
  • AFRISTAT's participation in international statistical training work groups;
  • a variety of support in the form of technical workshops.

III. Products Created or Maintained

Through its support, the DASD has created and/or maintained tools available to Member States for statistics production.

In connection with regional activities, AFRISTAT has also developed special processing applications (data entry, balancing and analysis) for survey or administrative data (business registers, IHPC processing, IPIs, etc.).The main tools are:

  • the CHAPO application for harmonised computer calculation of price indexes, for WAEMU Member States (since 1998);
  • the ERETES module, a tool for preparing national accounts in accordance with the United Nations National Accounts Systems (1993 and 2008);
  • the PHOENIX-WAEMU application for harmonised consumer price indexes, with WAEMU Commission financing (since 2011);
  • the module for data entry of type 123 employment surveys, the informal sector and consumption;
  • the data entry module for household spending surveys;
  • NSI websites;
  • the General Directorate website;
  • the General Directorate intranet;
  • other daily management tools.

AFRISTAT has supported the NSIs in mastering daily software packages (CSPro, SPSS, STATA, etc.) essential for statistical data processing and analysis.

IV.DASD Activity Perspectives

DASD members must remain vigilant to technological developments and Member State requests to provide appropriate support in their areas of expertise:

  • Institutional Support:in accordance with the recent African Charter on Statistics, the DASD will support the NSIs in upgrading their statistical laws as well as their institutional changes.
  • Data Collection:AFRISTATmust support introduction and use of new collection means such as digitisation and mobile terminals (portable computers, PDA, etc.) and online surveys, automatic collection of geo-referenced information, etc.
  • Information Distribution:the NSIs will put in place systems on their websites for consulting data online through personalised requests that will produce tables, graphs and maps from national databases.
  • Data bases:AFRISTAT will pursue its technical support to countries for the regular updating of data bases necessary for monitoring national development policies.
  • Data banks:AFRISTAT will encourage its Member States to document and archive survey data or censuses for better validation by diverse or longitudinal analyses.Work is underway to implement a regional NADAon the AFRISTAT website.
  • Distribution Policy:AFRISTAT must also support the countries in adopting national distribution policies generally, and particularly the distribution of micro-data from censuses and statistical surveys.
  • Geographic Information Systems:The national statistical institutions must also put effort into using geographic information systems to respondto sectorial needs (agriculture, population, security, etc.).
  • Institutional Communication:statisticians must learn new techniques to better communicate on statistical data.For that, AFRISTAT hopes to pursue training NSI analyst managers in writing, use of Web 2.0 and social networks (Twitter, Facebook, Wiki, etc.).In addition, AFRISTAT will pursue improvement of its own visibility.
  • Quality Approach:initiativeswill continue for its implementation in AFRISTAT and Member Countries.

Conclusion

The DASD remains strategic owing to its involvement in most of AFRISTAT’s activities.The main handicap is the lack of human resources to deal with the role it plays in AFRISTAT and with the Member States.The DASD is aware of this situation and efforts will be made as soon as means permit reinforcement of its human resources.

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