Dr. Albina Chuwa, the Director General of NBS Tanzania, presented a paper on Building Confidence in the Use of Administrative Based Data Institutional Change towards Modernisation of the Statistical System, Tanzania Experience at the 2017 International Conference on Sustainable Development Goals Statistics (ICSDGS) - 4 - 6 October 2017 - Manila Philippine.
ABOUT THE PRESENTATION
This paper intends to share challenges and opportunities from the administrative based data for performance auditing. It is well documented that administrative based data is the information collected primarily for administrative purposes. Government collects this type of data for the purposes of registration, transaction and record keeping, usually during the delivery of a service.
During the implementation of MDG’s and SDG’s, administrative based data continued to play a key role to monitor and evaluate progress made. It has been found that over 70 percent of the statistical information that will be used to monitor SDG’s framework should come from administrative data.
Despite its significance, administrative data continued to face challenges. These include conformity of concepts and definitions with international standards, some of the NSO’s lags behind to cope with new paradigm shifts such as big data and open data, technologies and analysis. To this end, this has lead to mistrust among users especially policy makers of using frequently administrative data for performance auditing in our Governments. Incompleteness and inaccuracy of records is a serious constraints pertaining production of administrative data. This leads to late process of the required information for planning purposes and jeopardize data quality derived from this source.
Capacity of the staff to fill-out the forms, do some quality checks, and analyze the data in the Ministries, Departments and Agencies are not conversant. Lacks of political will to promote evidence based planning has contributed to slow down the process of improving administrative data in the developing countries. The importance of political will in the production of administrative based data cannot be over-emphasized. Allocation of resources, capacity building, and human development needs political will.
It is evident that, a sound administrative based data system cut down the cost of conducting regular surveys in any country and produce real time data. The current strength and opportunities around the implementation of SDG’s through harnessing technologies, human capacities, transformative agenda is the perfect path to follow in order to improve administrative base data. To join hands with global movement such as Global Partnership for Sustainable Development for Data could help to achieve our vision in the use of administrative based data.
Tanzania National Bureau of Statistics, through his National Strategies for Development of Statistics decided to transform a paper based population register to electronic Population Registration System (e-PRS). It is modernizing the historical Village Register that has existed in the country since 1980s. With e-PRS, the information can be updated and produce the intended statistical data. Features such as Global Positioning System (GPS) coordinates of a household, passport photo of an individual, an age on an individual that is based on a real time clock within a system are some of the benefits of an electronic system.
The system is currently under development and experts from MCC-PEPFAR in collaboration with NSO are working on the development of the dashboards for the three districts.
To conclude, leveraging technologies and partners to build confidence in the use of administrative based data becomes imperative.
