Development of a Statistical Quality Assurance Framework for the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa

Date
Section
OoD
Document Type
Statistical Operational Documents
Keywords Description Background and rationale
Statistics sit at the heart of ECA’s mandate, as they support regional monitoring, think tank operations, speeches by leadership, policy engagement, flagship reports, country support, advocacy, and the public visibility of the Commission’s work. The ECA relies on statistics from three main sources: the National Statistical System, international databases, and ECAStats. Rarely does ECA collect its own primary data to generate statistics, integrate and reprocess national micro-datasets, or further analyze already-computed statistics for the designation of regional official statistics. The absence of a Statistical Quality Assurance Framework (SQAF) for harvesting statistics from the three different sources and for the above-mentioned varied uses has led to disparities in the use of national and regional statistics. Among other factors, the disparities have arisen from the unavailability or incompleteness of metadata, differences between country-specific and internationally comparable harmonized statistics, differences in the timing of updating and accessing the statistics, the credibility of the international database, and variations in the configuration of platforms and search engines used to harvest the statistics.

The disparities pose a credibility risk to the Commission. This is because the disparities weaken the potential to achieve the outcomes of policy interventions, render statistics untraceable and irreproducible, lead to inconsistent submissions across the ECA leadership, make statistics non-comparable and non-relatable over time, and cause cost inefficiencies in implementing development agendas. The foregoing underscores the need to shift from the current siloed, unstructured, and ad hoc modes of verifying and validating statistics to a whole-of-Commission approach to ensure quality assurance in the use of statistics. With one of the UN80 directives advancing a UN Data Commons agenda through a regional resetting framework, strongly underpinned by a call for integration, the ECA must urgently and collectively institutionalize internal procedures to steward the credibility of official statistics for the continent’s development.

This concept note provides preliminary guidelines in actualizing the development, implementation and enforcement of a Commission-wide SQAF. The success of the SQAF will be premised on intellectual alignment on nuances in the use of numbers, notably their intuitiveness, given the state of conceptual and theoretical clarity regarding development issues, relationships, and context across divisions in the Commission. In this regard, this exercise will be undertaken in tandem with the publication of statistical briefs on blocks of development indicators by the African Centre for Statistics. (ACS). Also, the workings of the SQAF will be aligned with the African Knowledge Management Hub (AKMH) to ensure linkages and seamless comparability across knowledge resources, mainly statistics and policy documents, from all divisions and over time.

The remaining sections of this concept note are structured as follows: Purpose and scope of the Framework; Guiding orientation of the ECA SQAF; Framework development process; Governance, deliverables, and next step; and Expected early gains and key implementation cautions.
Additional Notes

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