The Namibia Statistics Act stipulates that once a year the agency needs to engage the users and producers of statistics.
The aim of such engagement is to share with all and sundry what the agency has been up to, to report on its progress, and most importantly, to hear from our stakeholders their views about our statistics and how we can improve.
Two weeks ago we had such an engagement, which was known as the User-Producer Workshop. It went well and we were happy with the participation. Of course, there is always room for improvement in any such undertaking.
The stakeholders we brought together included statistics producers, respondents, users of statistics and research, as well as training institutions. Let me briefly explain why we invited these stakeholders.
As we know, nothing great has even been achieved in isolation. The same applies to the concept of relevant, accurate, reliable and timely statistics. These few concepts are what drive the NSA. Statistics producers are those institutions that provide us with data.
To simplify matters, the NSA acquires its statistics not through guesswork or some other unreliable source, but from those that produce them. Of course statistics differ and hence so do statistics producers. Examples are big and small businesses, customs offices, trade officials and others. The respondents in this case are those loyal citizens and institutions that respond to our surveys, censuses and other instruments used to acquire data. For example, currently we are conducting the Household Income and Expenditure Survey and the respondents are the citizens that we interview and ask questions.
‘Users of statistics’ refers to all of us. Everybody uses statistics in some way or another. The major users of statistics are government, businesses, research and academic institutions, as well as individuals. For example, a business might want to know the population size or buying power of a certain locality.
Economists would want to know how the economy is performing. Government would want to, for example, know how many citizens actually receive the services provided. Research and academic institutions are also significant users, as they would always want to be up to date with the latest happenings in the world.
For the NSA to be able to do its work it has to engage all these users and producers with the aim of ensuring that we all understand the importance of statistics. Whether it is statistical collection, compilation, storage or usage.
The success of such engagement, implementation and awareness is crucial to ensure that Namibia has relevant, accurate, reliable and timely data. We are certain that the availability of statistics in the country has significantly improved since the establishment of the NSA.
This is partly due to various stakeholders coming on board and ensuring that they play their rightful role in this endeavour. We cannot thank you enough for it.
At the beginning I said that we are all statisticians. A business would count its stock, its income and expenses, amongst others, and then form an opinion of how it is performing. The same can be said about our education system. Officials would want to know how many students we have, how many wrote exams and also how many passed or failed.
Understanding these requires an element of statistics, no matter how small. As fellow statisticians, let us not shy away from obtaining all the necessary statistics from the NSA. We might just have it.
* Iipumbu Sakaria is the Deputy Director for Strategic Communications at the NSA.