The Minister for Agriculture, Geraldine Mukeshimana, has advised African countries to develop sound agricultural policies and strategies based on reliable and timely agricultural statistics if they are to achieve sustainable and meaningful economic growth on the continent.

Mukeshimana said this yesterday while officially opening the 24th African Commission on Agricultural Statistics (AFCAS) meeting in Kigali.

The minister told about 100 delegates from various countries at the four-day high level meeting that Rwanda attaches great value to generating timely, reliable and relevant agricultural statistics for effective strategic formulation, planning and monitoring of various development interventions in the agriculture sector.

"The government has prominently focused on strengthening the monitoring and evaluation capacity through adopting sound statistical methodologies and enhancing analytical skills,” he said.

The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) Representative to Rwanda, Attaher Maiga, indicated that the pivotal role that the agricultural sector plays in the socio-economic development in African countries had been repeatedly underscored.

It was noted that policy frameworks including national agricultural investment plans, the Comprehensive African Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP), and the Sustainable Development Goals need to be monitored. This requires statistics and information to be produced and disseminated in a timely manner and the role of national, regional and global agricultural statistic systems is key.

Unfortunately, Maiga pointed out, many African countries have until now failed to establish sustainable and adequate systems for the collection of agricultural statistics and lack capability to use available information for analytical studies for policy formulation, monitoring and evaluation.

Josef Schmidhuber, FAO’s deputy director, Statistics Division in Rome, Italy, said that within his organisation, statistics continue to gain an ever-higher priority and benefits from greater internal coordination.

"On a global level, we are pleased to see the growing importance placed by the international community on strengthening agricultural statistical systems. The single biggest effort in this regard is arguably the Global Strategy to Improve Agricultural and Rural Statistics.”

The recent EICV4 report indicated that agriculture contributed 33 per cent of Rwanda’s GDP while employing most Rwandans. The report also revealed that food crop production had grown more than twice faster the rate of the population from 2011 to 2014.

The AFCAS is a statutory body of FAO that meets every two years, bringing together senior statistics officials from member countries in Africa, who are responsible for the development of agricultural statistics.

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