The document discusses building institutional capacity for statistics in Ethiopia. It notes that building capacity through developing human resources, legal frameworks, and statistical infrastructure helps create good governance and reliable data. Ethiopia's Central Statistical Agency has focused on training statisticians, strengthening branches with computers, and collaborating with other organizations. Challenges include retaining staff and improving office infrastructure, but lessons from Ethiopia's efforts include owning new techniques, prioritizing agriculture and nutrition data, allocating an annual budget, and utilizing new technologies.

1. The Perspective of Ethiopia
By
Samia Zekaria
Director General
Central Statistical Agency
IFPRI 2020 International Conference ,
15-17 May 2014, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

2. Why build institutional capacity?
 It is a way of creating good governance and integrity as it
pursues the development of effective and efficient
institutional arrangements to establish a reliable
information, monitoring and measurement system.
 It is to be noted that sustainability of capacity and
continued development of an institution is crucial to carry
out its critical functions reasonably well in a sustained
manner.

3. Requirements to build institutional
capacity
 An enabling policy environment and a realistic investment
to create, strengthen and sustain human resource
development of the National Statistics System.
 Legal framework to develop effective institutions that
produce reliable and timely information for monitoring and
evaluation of an implemented program.
 Building statistical capacity is also one of the requirements
to improve information, monitoring, and measurement
systems of a country.

4. What is Statistical Capacity?
 Statistical capacity is the ability of countries to meet
user needs for good quality statistics – usually those
statistics that are considered to be “official” (i.e. those
statistics produced by governments as a public good).
 Statistical capacity building is sometimes part of
broader programs (e.g. budget support, health,
education),which cannot be easily identified and/or
quantified, since statistics are not always identified as
a sector in their own right. (P21, 2006)

5. Indicators of Statistical Capacity Building (SCB)
 The SCB indicators measure the statistical conditions in a
country through:
 Quantitative indicators cover resources (domestically and
externally funded annual budget, staff, and equipment),
inputs (survey and administrative data sources), and
statistical products;
 Qualitative indicators focus on relevant aspects of
environment (institutional and organizational), of core
statistical processes, and of statistical products.

6. Status of Agricultural and Nutrition
Statistics in Africa
• Despite the importance of the agriculture in African
economies and societies, agricultural and nutrition
statistics systems in many countries are among the
weakest components of national statistical systems.
• Mostly limited resources contributed to weak capacity
for producing agricultural and nutrition statistics
resulted poor data quality in many African countries.

7.  One of the most important factors contributing to the
weakness of agricultural statistics system in many
countries is that agricultural statistics is not adequately
integrated into the National Statistical System, and the
National Strategies for the Development of Statistics
(NSDS)do not adequately cover the agricultural sector.
 The current result agenda of policy makers is data
intensive which requires highly integrated , consistent
and timely data , in other words better statistics.
Status of Agricultural Statistics in Africa

8. Training for Statistical Capacity
Building
 To make training more relevant for strengthening
statistical capacity development, there is a need for
enhanced collaboration between academic and official
statistician and revision of curricula to take official
statistics on board.
 E-learning, peer review, experience sharing with
others are also important aspects of capacity building
in the National Statistics System.

9. Institutional Capacity Development
Ethiopian - Context
Human Resource Development
 Capacity Building of statistician is accorded highest
priority by the CSA management in facilitating training
opportunities in both national and international
universities to attend Masters level courses, seminars,
and workshops conducted by international forum.
 Building statistical capacity of middle and junior staff
members is essential to bridge the efficiency gap and to
promote staff harmony.

10. Institutional Capacity Development
Ethiopian- Context
Statistical Infrastructure
 With donors’ support all 25 Branch Statistical Offices
of the CSA have been strengthened and equipped with
computers to decentralize data entry.
 Acquiring new technology such as Scanning
Technology and IT equipment have improved the
timeliness and the quality of statistics data.

11. Institutional Capacity Development
Ethiopian- Context (cont’d)
• The introduction of hand held computer (PDA) and CAPI for data
collection proved to be very efficient in the production of price
data on timely fashion in Ethiopia.
• The utilization of GPS for area measurement in agricultural
statistics has also proved to be cost effective and efficient in
improving the data quality as well as timeliness.
• Equal importance has been given for metadata documentation
and archiving to improve statistical data dissemination systems
of the country.

12. Collaborative works to build
institutional capacity- Ethiopian Context
 The Agency has been working with different institutions to build its
capacity by way of improving survey instruments, methodology, and
analytical capacity of its staff members.
Some examples are:
 Panel Surveys on productive safety net of Ethiopia- IFPRI
 Food security and vulnerability of households- WFP
 Rural Socio economic surveys – World bank
 Research on land, soil and production measurement experiment through
methodological validation - World Bank
 The benefit of these collaborative works in building institutional
capacity is enormous in acquiring cutting edge new technology that
improved the overall capacity to produce timely and quality statistical
data.

13. What do we share?
Lessons we share to effectively utilize the
efforts of building statistical capacity are:
 The CSA always tries to own the techniques and the
know how obtained through capacity building, and
empower its staff members to utilize it.
 The leadership gives due attention and exerts a lot of
efforts to improve progressively its agricultural and
nutrition statistics data through time.

14. What do we share?
 The Ethiopian Government allocates annual budget
for statistical activity as one its important sectors and
utilizes the information for its policy formulation.
 Continuous staff training at masters level of at least 15
personnel each year both locally and abroad as
capacity building components to build its human
resources.
 Realization and implementation of new technologies
and IT infrastructure for improved statistical
activities.

15. Challenges
 Staff retention,
 Not being autonomous from Civil Service System
 Inadequate Office Infrastructure at HQs and Branch
Statistical Offices to improve staff productivity.

16. Thank you
Amesegenalehu