From 7 to 11 August, 2017 Gaborone, Botswana
In this quarter, the training component focused on extending the implementation of the training of trainers to additional universities, training centers as well as NSOs and Ministries of Agriculture. Three training of trainer workshops on the topics of Effective use of Administrative Data, Food Balance Sheets in English and French have been delivered. The trainings have been generously hosted by the respective national statistical offices of Statistic Botswana, National Statistical Institutes of Morocco and Tunisia. The three workshops have served almost 80 participants from a total of 21 African Countries. Institution wise, an extensive reach has been undertaken in inviting new and active universities working in Agricultural Statistics training and research across the various sub-regions in the continent.
The main objectives of this Training of Trainers (ToT) workshop was to give the participants the skills and competencies necessary for producing and using as a team a Food Balance sheet based on agricultural censuses and surveys that allow easy integration of the data from various areas of statistics, including demographic statistics and other economic statistics.
The ToT was primarily designed to serve Statistical Training Centers, Schools, and Universities as well as national statistical offices and Ministries of agriculture dealing with the production and contributing to the development of National Food Balance Sheets in their respective countries. Some selected NSOs were invited to present their experiences as practical showcase. The participants for this training were drawn from statistical training Centers and Universities such as L’Institut Sous-régional de Statistique et d’Economie Appliquée (ISSEA)- Cameroun, Institut De formation Et de Recherche Demographiques (IFORD)- Cameroun, Haremaya University- Harar, Ethiopia, Makerere University – Kampala, Uganda , Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics (CAPMAS)- Egypt, Faculty of Agriculture, University of Khartoum, Sudan; Fisheries Hatchery Management, Aquatic Pollution and Toxicology, University of IBADAN- Nigeria ; University of Nairobi, Faculty of Agriculture, Nairobi, Kenya ; University of Namibia, Faculty of Agriculture and Natural Resources, Windhoek, Namibia; Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Zambia, Lusaka Zambia ; School of Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science, University of Kwazulu-Natal, South Africa. The National Statistical Offices from the following countries were also integral part of the training of trainers: Lesotho, Malawi, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Gambia, Libya, Rwanda, and South Sudan
The workshop was officially opened by Ms. Ms Anna Majelantle, Statistics General of the National Statistics Office of Botswana. In her opening Ms. Majelantle stated FBS were the main source of data used in the assessment and appreciation of the world food situation and they were also suitable in estimating the overall food shortages or surplus in a country. “They are useful in developing projections of future food supply and demand as well as evaluating national food and nutrition policies,” she said, adding that FBS provided sound baseline data for policy analysis and decision-making needed to ensure food security. She said they expected the workshop to result with better understanding of the requirements for producing and using FBS to enhance statistics on agriculture and to improve physical scope of official statistics by mainstreaming agricultural statistics within the national statistical systems of Africa. On the other hand, she said this would ultimately result in an enhanced capacity of African national statistical systems that produced and disseminated high quality agricultural statistics.1
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1 Goweditswe Kome: 08 August 2017, “Development stakeholders collaborate to improve agricultural statistics “Botswana Daily News. http://www.dailynews.gov.bw/news-details.php?nid=37681