The United Nations’ Fundamental Principles of Official Statistics (FPOs) provide National Statistical Offices (NSOs) the basic guidelines and standards for generation of official statistics. These form the basis for data collection, and compilation of national and sub-national indicators adhering to the agreed principles and standardized methodologies apart from ensuring fairness, transparency, and privacy protection in its dissemination.
The digitized world is generating an amount of data which now competes with the NSOs statistics in terms of its almost real time availability and speed of dissemination. Data availability from a wide variety of sources is seen as an opportunity as well as challenge in terms of its ethical use and maintaining representativeness, public trust, privacy, and equity. The burden is now on the NSOs to be agile and ensure the quality of its products besides overseeing that the data generated across the other systems meets the test of internationally agreed principles of quality statistics. How best the NSOs can provide this service to citizens is the key question.
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Presentations
- The Role of National Statistical - Murangwa Yusuf, Director General, National Institute of statistics of Rwanda
- Implementing responsible data stewardship practices - Simon Whitworth, UK Statistics Authority
- Data Stewardship in Africa: Role of NSOs
- Working Group on Data Stewardship (WGDS): Background & context