Improving Agricultural Statistics in the COMCEC Region
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OPPORTUNITIES
 Leadership in the developing world in the area
of agricultural statistics
 New Census of Agriculture in 2014/2015
 Re-activated National Agricultural Statistics
Technical Committee (NASTC)
 The culture for collection of administrative
records for agricultural statistics
 Use of new information technologies for data
capture, processing and dissemination
through GIS
 Participation in CountrySTAT
 New statisticians hired in the MAAIF
 Needs of international funding agencies
THREATS
 Lack of financial resources
 Weak coordination amongst statistical producers and
users
 Missing role and responsibilities in the collection of
statistics. Size of informal sector (home production
and consumption)
 International organization requests not consistent
with national needs and priorities
 Experienced staff retirement and non-replacement

NEEDS
 Increase in funding for sustainability in periodical surveys
 Increase in human resources and physical resources
 Setting up a farm (agricultural holding) registers
 Conduction of more specialized surveys on food and agriculture
 A comprehensive, interactive and accessible database on agricultural statistics
 Improvement of the analytical capacity in UBOS and MAAIF
 Training on modern statistical data collection, analysis and reporting methodologies
 Training on use of statistical analysis packages and other softwares
 Strengthening statistical coordination among the various partners
 Institutional restructuring for statistical production in other relevant ministries and agencies
 A micro and metadata dissemination policy
 Publicly known data dissemination calendar
 Evaluation and audit of major statistical surveys and reporting of confidence intervals
 Improving the visibility of the agricultural statistics
 Satellite and quarterly accounts for agriculture
 Censuses of greenhouses; Surveys of irrigated land, farm structure, production cost; production and input
utilization accounts.
 Consistency check of statistics produced and used by different institutions