Improving Agricultural Statistics in the COMCEC Region

employment is crucial to providing an informed decision-making process. It is also important

to encourage investment and effective international aid. This will lead it to the appropriate

policy interventions, enhancing competitiveness of the agricultural value chains to meeting the

MDGs.

Organization of the Agricultural Statistics System

Like any other National Statistical Institute, CSO has its country-specific institutional

framework, which is embedded in areas such as statistical law, supervision and auditing;

budget procedures, recruitment and pay; and grading rules of the government. A substantial

amount of statistical information is made available via the websites of the Afghanistan National

Development Strategy (ANDS), Capacity Development Plan (CDP) and CSO. This also holds for

the CSO’s internal institutional set-up like its Statistical Task Force, its organogram and its

work groups and committees.

The Legal Framework:

The ANDS is under the mandate of the CSO. Under Statistics Law

2006, which is currently under revision, it defined the strategic role of CSO in monitoring and

evaluating itself. As stated in the country's Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP), the ANDS

consists of three phases: (i) formulation, (ii) implementation, and (iii) monitoring and

evaluation. The monitoring and evaluation phase runs parallel to implementation, allowing the

actions and measures taken to be monitored, and to provide an indication of their efficiencies

and effectiveness in meeting the poverty reduction and development targets.

The Afghanistan compact benchmarks and the MDGs have been integrated into the ANDS

Sector Strategies. The role of CSO in conducting monitoring and evaluating of ANDS has been

clearly defined. The ANDS emphasizes maintaining “transparency and accountability and

encouraging support from NGOs, the CSO and citizens providing data and analysis of its

findings”, and building the “core institutional capacities needed to sustain monitoring and

evaluation processes, both within the Central Monitoring and Reporting System (CMRS), as

well as the CSO,

National Risk and Vulnerability Assessment

(NRVA) and line ministry

systems”.

CSO has a strong internal audit system, and it is also subject to external auditing, which is

conducted by the Audit Department of the President’s Office. External interventions, however,

are notably rarely conducted.

Institutional Set Up:

Two institutions play significant roles in Afghanistan’s agricultural

statistical system. These are mainly the Ministry of Agriculture, Irrigation and Livestock

(MAIL) through its newly established Agricultural Statistics and Marketing Information

Management Department (ASMIM); and the CSO through its Agricultural Division. They are

both responsible for agricultural surveys, statistics on agricultural production, producer prices

and costs of production, monitoring of agricultural support, GIS and managing sample frames.

In addition, the Economic Statistics Department of CSO is responsible for the national accounts

CSO, 2012.

CSO, 2014a and CSO, 2014b.

CSO, 2012 and CSO, 2014b.

Ibid