This was on the occasion of the technical meeting for the validation of the said program organized on Tuesday, June 13, 2023 in Yaoundé.
The members of the National Statistical Information System (SNIS) met on June 13, 2023, to take stock of the budgeting of the 2023 Annual Work Plan and subsequently, to examine and validate the 2024-2026 statistical program. This important meeting organized by the National Institute of Statistics (INS) took place in the presence of its top management. During his speech, the Director General of the INS, Joseph TEDOU, in his capacity as president of the work, invited the participants to examine in depth the documents presented to them and to make their strong contributions before proceeding with the validation.
After the adoption of the draft agenda by the participants, the first presentation made by Mr. Ambroise ABANDA, Head of the Statistical Coordination and Dissemination Division of the INS focused on the context of the project itself. Following the evaluation in 2022 of the National Strategy for the Development of Statistics (SNDS), it was mentioned that the monitoring of budgeting is one of the levers to increase the financing of national statistical projects. It is therefore a question of developing a statistical program that covers the period 2024-2026, in order to better measure the effectiveness of the planning and programming of statistical activities by the SNIS member administrations.
The second presentation made by Mr. Olivier TCHAMAGO allowed the audience to learn about the content of the program itself, which concerns the sectors of education, housing, health, agriculture, etc. Once these prerequisites have been decided, the flagship statistical activities to be carried out over the period 2024-2026 at the INS and in sectoral administrations were presented in detail. Several recommendations were made following this presentation, including training administrations to include statistical activities in their Medium-Term Expenditure Framework (MTEF) and to budget for them; raise awareness among administrations of the need to allocate resources to statistical production for the production of performance indicators; strengthen the capacities of human resources involved in the programming and budgeting chain; organize a meeting with partners for the advocacy of the SNDS30; intensify advocacy for the security of financial resources for statistical production; etc.
In addition, possible solutions for facilitating the programming of statistical activities and budgeting for these activities in the Annual Work Plan were proposed. Among other things, it is a question of including the statistical component in the projects financed by donors; monitoring and evaluation of statistical activities; advocate for a larger budget for the implementation of statistical activities. According to Joseph TEDOU, the statistical program must underpin the production of performance indicators, therefore, the Director General invited the sectoral administrations to fill in the performance indicator evaluation sheets and return them to the INS in the following days.
The 2024-2026 statistical program validated at the end of the work will be used in the framework of the Expanded Budget Programming Conferences as well as in any other high-level meeting that would allow the budgeting of statistical projects.
