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By Chaimae Boulifa
Rabat – Aiming to improve the availability and quality of national and international statistics in the fields of food and agriculture, the African Centre for Statistics affiliated to the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) is holding a training workshop on food balance in agricultural statistics August 22 to 25 in Rabat.
According to a press release issued by the ECA, the workshop is “for the benefit of experts and trainers from ten francophone African countries including: Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Djibouti, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Niger, Senegal, Chad, and Togo.”
The meeting, which was planned to facilitate decision-making in the field of food and agriculture, is intended as an opportunity to provide participants with the “knowledge and expertise needed to carry out detailed agricultural surveys and censuses by optimizing the use of technologies for the production of agricultural statistics (digital tablets, teledetection, geographic information systems, etc.),” wrote the event’s organizers in a statement.
The training session is also designed “to enable participants to share their newly acquired knowledge within their respective organizations,” helping to “enhance African national statistical systems’ ability to produce high quality agricultural statistics.”
The initiative is being held in partnership with the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the African Development Bank (AfDB) and the High Commission for Planning (HCP, Morocco). It is one in a series of workshops carried out in Africa as part of the global strategy to improve agricultural and rural statistics and the Africa action plan established by ECA, AfDB, and FAO for its implementation.
ECA, which is one of the five regional commissions of the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), plans to organize its next workshop training 19 to 22 September in Tunisia, with the aim of boosting experts’ ability to extract agricultural statistical data from administrative sources.
Through its North Africa office, ECA aims to support the development of seven countries across the sub-region (Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, Mauritania, Tunisia, and Sudan), by helping them formulate and implement policies and programs that support their economic and social transformation.
