“The operationalization of national committees for the development of sectoral statistical indicators in the region of the Community of West African States (ECOWAS)”, this is the theme of a workshop which has been held since October 24, 2022 in Lagos, Nigeria. The workshop is organized by the ECOWAS Commission with financial support from the World Bank.
The main objective of this meeting is to bring together regional experts from member states of the West African organization and some key directorates of ECOWAS in order to review, discuss and adequately validate the statistical indicators frameworks and guidelines. prepared by the Department in charge of Statistics of the ECOWAS Commission.
The frameworks thus developed should allow the collection of quality statistical data in the Member States, and comparable at the regional and international levels. These statistics cover the fields of education, health, agriculture, demography and population, environment, communication, transport, tourism and civil status, gender, industry, energy and infrastructure.
At the end of the work, the results will serve as a reference point for the execution of the questionnaire which will be used by the National Statistical Offices (NSOs) and the Directorate of Research and Statistics of the ECOWAS Commission to update update the annual publications on regional statistical data.
As a reminder, the ECOWAS Commission received a financial grant from the World Bank to implement the Project for the Harmonization and Improvement of Statistics in West Africa (PHASAO). This project supports the National Statistical Systems (NSS) and the Regional Statistical System (RSS) of ECOWAS in the process of producing updated, reliable and harmonized statistics mainly covering social and economic data.
The objective of the project is to strengthen the statistical systems of participating countries and regional bodies in West Africa in order to harmonize, produce, disseminate and improve the use of key economic and social statistics.
More specifically, the regional component of the project aims to support the following activities: (a) the production of harmonized methodologies; (b) production of key economic and social statistics, including national accounts and price statistics; (c) improving targeted administrative statistics; d) training on methodological improvements and human capacity building as well as collecting additional data to improve quality and on-time production basic statistics by National Statistical Institutes; (e) dissemination and use of data; (f) institutional reforms.
