Global Strategy to Improve Agricultural and Rural Statistics
Joining forces to build stronger national statistical systems
The Global Strategy implements its activities through a partnership between FAO, the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) and PARIS21, with the financial support of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the European Commission.
These actors joined forces with partner countries to increase their capacity to produce, analyze and disseminate agricultural data for meeting the data requirements of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) (in particular SDG 2) and the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP).
FAO’s expertise and knowledge of the rural contexts will be complemented with the experience of Paris21 in the development of innovative approaches, promoting leadership and improving human resources policies in statistics. UNECA contributes with its proven efficiency in organizing trainings and providing scholarships in Africa in collaboration with statistical training centers.
The Global Strategy is conceived for establishing the foundations and a favorable working environment at country level that will allow countries to strengthen their statistical skills before implementing complex agricultural integrated surveys. By doing so, the Global Strategy facilitates the implementation of the 50x2030 Initiative to Close the Agricultural Data Gap in countries eligible to the Initiative.
The 50x2030 Initiative is a multi-partner programme that seeks to bridge the global agricultural data gap by transforming country data systems in 50 countries by 2030. The initiative focuses on improving country level data by building strong nationally representative survey programmes. To allow the implementation of 50x2030 a minimum level of organization, knowledge and capacity should be available at project inception at country level. Experience has revealed capacities to be quite low, particularly in areas such as sampling, data processing and analysis. Accordingly, for countries with very low capacities it is common that the staff working in the agricultural statistics sector lack basic statistical skills, which can significantly delay the data collection and the ability of the country to compute required indicators.
The Global Strategy can have a major positive impact on the implementation of 50x2030 Initiative by laying this groundwork and capacity needed prior to data collection.