Develop countries’ capacities to produce quality agricultural statistics

The Global Strategy works with countries to improve their capability to produce a minimum set of core, quality, and timely data items and to compile key agricultural statistics. Achieving such objective entails the building of advanced technical expertise among national staff involved in the production of agricultural and food security statistics, to prepare the national teams in the customization of the tools to be put in place in the framework of the 50x2030 Initiative as well as to reinforce organizational and operational capacities within the agencies.

Technical assistance is provided through the programme towards the adoption of state-of-the-art and cost-effective methodologies, developed in the first phase of GSARS. This area of work is organized around four thematic technical packages:

1. Enhance countries’ capacity to prepare survey tools for agricultural production surveys, building the minimum critical mass of capacity and practice required to engage in survey programme operations and, by doing so, preparing countries for a better implementation of the long-term activities of the 50x2030 Initiative. Assistance covers questionnaire design, survey implementation, data editing, data cleaning, estimations and include support in the use of CAPI. A special focus is given to mainstream gender-relevant questions into the questionnaires, thus allowing the required level of gender disaggregation of the results.
2. Provide countries with the appropriate knowledge on data collection and analytical tools to measure key economic aggregates, such as incomes, cost of production and agricultural productivity, both at the farm and commodity-level;
3. Support countries in producing more timely, reliable and comprehensive information to measure harvest and post-harvest losses of agricultural commodities on the farm, given that most of the countries covered by the Global Strategy and by the 50x2030 Initiative face food security challenges and rely on agriculture for providing the livelihoods for a majority of their population;
4. Promote cost-effective approach to implement integrated agricultural surveys, such as developing and using master sampling frames (MSF) for quality and integrated agricultural statistics. This will prepare the ground for the implementation of the 50x2030 Initiative in the beneficiary countries where the availability of quality master sampling frames and suitable sampling designs to produce the basic required statistics at national and subnational level are considered as a prerequisite for an efficient implementation of integrated surveys.