Since 2017, FAO has been providing technical and financial assistance to the Government of Senegal to expand the existing annual agricultural survey, namely the Enquete Agricole Annuelle (EAA), using the AGRISurvey methodology.
Since the implementation of AGRISurvey, evidence has shown significant improvements in terms of the country’s technical, organizational and institutional capacity in collecting, processing, analyzing and disseminating agricultural survey data.
A consensual roadmap was established to guide the implementation of the activities over the period 2017–2021, in partnership with the Direction de l’Analyse, de la Prévision et des Statistiques Agricoles (DAPSA -Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Equipment), and in close collaboration with other national stakeholders, including the Prime Ministry and the Agence Nationale de la Statistique et de la Démographie (ANSD). The partners established an institutional framework endorsed by the Government to ensure the technical and operational supervision of all the activities and agreed on a timetable for the implementation of AGRISurvey rotating modules.
To date, three cycles of the annual surveys have been successfully conducted under the technical and financial assistance of the AGRISurvey programme: EAA 2017-2018, EAA 2018-2019 and EAA 2019-2020, with the following realizations:
- Capacity-building activities on the AGRIS methodology, use of technology for data collection and management.
- Expansion of the scope of the EAA to include household holding’s livestock and household-level production data.
- Extension of the questionnaires with additional sections on horticulture and agroforestry.
- Integration of AGRISurvey rotating module on Economy in the survey’s cycle 2018-2019.
- Sampling design to improve the representativity of other agricultural activities at household level (livestock and horticulture).
- Partial integration, due to the circumstances of Covid-19, of the AGRISurvey rotating module on Production Methods and Environment (PME) in the first visit of the survey’s cycle 2019-2020.
For the last round of annual survey under the AGRISurvey’s assistance, planned for 2020-2021 further improvements will be put in place through the full integration of two additional rotating modules of AGRISurvey (PME and Machinery, Equipment and Assets - MEA), and giving special attention to technical capacity building activities in data processing and dissemination, to ensure the sustainability of the project.
In addition to the above realizations, AGRISurvey has been working with DAPSA at strengthening its agricultural statistics dissemination programme and thereby ensuring that data generated through the EAA are made available to the users in view of enabling research and supporting policy analysis, design and monitoring. This resulted in a series of statistical outputs available on-line to the public such as reports of the annual surveys, thematic statistical tables, and the cataloguing of EAA survey micro-data files on the national platforms. The release of these statistical outputs by DAPSA, which cover a wide range of essential agricultural data, provides policy makers in Senegal and national and international stakeholders with easy access to critical information for agriculture sector policy design and monitoring.
Finally, AGRISurvey and DAPSA are also collaborating on the listing operations regarding the non-household sector farms in prospect to build a Master Sampling Frame combining both household holdings and non-household farms.