The opening ceremony of the workshop was chaired by the Director General of the National Institute of Statistics, in the presence of his collaborators and about fifteen journalists from the national press.
While the implementation of Cameroon’s Development Strategy has been launched for a few months, the National Institute of Statistics, a member of the National Monitoring and Evaluation Committee for the Implementation of the SND30, is anticipating fake news and putting journalists in the school of factchecking. In his opening remarks, Mr. TEDOU Joseph, Director General of the INS urged the media to show professionalism in monitoring the implementation of the SND30 by avoiding peddling the rumor that tends to denigrate the Government’s efforts for the development of Cameroon, but to obtain supplies from the official source of data. The training workshop dedicated to journalists from 14 to 16 July 2021 at the INS headquarters aims to provide the media with tools to monitor the implementation of the SND30. The aim is to help them understand what the SND30 consists of, the nature of the data that will inform the various indicators, the origin of this data and the action to be taken in the presence of it. To this end, five presentations were prepared for them by the officials of the National Institute of Statistics
The first presentation on the monitoring and evaluation of the implementation of the SND30 aimed to situate the framework and the supports for popularizing the data and statistical indicators of the system put in place to deploy this strategy. The second presentation on the rebasing of the national accounts and macroeconomic issues in the context of the NDS30 clarified the rationale for changing the base year of the accounts in relation to the NDS30.
Both the third and fourth presentations examine the contribution of business statistics and household surveys to the implementation of the NDS30. The fifth and final presentation will aim to provide an appropriate framework for collaboration between users and producers of official statistics to ensure that the necessary information is available.
The journalists present at this meeting asked the panelists about the timing of the dissemination of data from the implementation of the Strategy and expressed the hope that the deadlines for the publication of statistics would be reasonable enough to guarantee consistency between figures and facts. The participants from the private and public media of the national territory welcomed this initiative, which they hope will be sustainable.