BY VICTOR BAATWENG
The demand for more frequent statistical data and indicators continues to increase, a trend that has since forced the national statistics agency ÔÇô Statistics Botswana (SB) to reconsider the frequency of the publication of its statistical products.
This past week, the agency said, going forward it will produce labour force and economic activity indicators on quarterly basis.
Statistician General ÔÇô Dr Burton Mguni said Statistics Botswana has commenced the continuous Multi topic Household survey in response to stakeholder needs to make timely policy interventions on labour and poverty information.
“The demand for more frequent statistical data and indicators continued to increase, driven to in part by challenges of poverty and unemployment among others and this prompted Statistics Botswana to reconsider the frequency of our statistical products and fashion our data collection and processing process to respond accordingly”, said Mguni.
As part of its strategy to pave way for the change in statistical data releasing frequency, SB is said to rope in the use of the Computer Assisted Personal Interviews (CAPI) system. The system is expected to reduce the time lag between field data collection and the release of the reports.
Mguni said that the use of CAPI has gained ground and yielded positive results in a number of countries and Statistics Botswana could not be left behind.
“The survey field work started on the 10th of July 2019 and through CAPI system we are able to monitor the progress and quality of data collection. This makes us confident that we will be able to produce the reports timeously”, said Mguni.
Meanwhile the first result which will include labour and selected ICT statistics for the July ÔÇô September 2019 quarter survey is expected to be published by November 2019.
Statistics Botswana has overtime been conducting household surveys as part of the programme of inter-censal surveys among which were the labour force survey and household income and Expenditure survey.
