At the end of the 24th African Commission on Agricultural Statistics (AFCAS) meeting held in Kigali on Friday , experts encouraged the establishment of a data review process that allows countries to validate data for publication by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

It was one of the 37 recommendations of the four-day session aimed at reviewing the state of food and agricultural statistics in Africa and advising AFCAS member states on the development and standardization of agricultural statistics within the general framework of FAO’s work, among others.

"In this context, it is recognized that this review process would need to be limited to the basic data statistics and that the time window for such a process would need to be narrow to ensure a timely dissemination,” reads part of the meeting’s final report.

Francesco Tubiello, FAO Natural Resources Officer, told The New Times that the element of sustainable development was especially given emphasis in the Kigali session.

"Sustainable development was new and mainly emphasized the importance of data during the process of policy making,” Tubiello said.

Improving on the census and paying attention to specific areas like environment, and cost of production, he said, were also important recommendations.

Among other things, the meeting encouraged member countries to advocate for greater financial commitments for national statistical efforts and sensitize governments on the need for evidence-based policy making.

Acknowledging what is an often low and stagnant response rate to pertinent FAO questionnaires, experts recommended that to address the problem, every country should designate a focal point responsible for statistical activities in agriculture and related areas and organize specific training to address data related issues. 

Developing multi-modal data harvesting options such as web based questionnaires and returning questionnaires even when no new data were available, were other elements proposed.

While opening the meeting, on Tuesday, the Minister of Agriculture, Geraldine Mukeshimana, underscored that African countries need to develop sound agricultural policies and strategies based on reliable and timely statistics to achieve sustainable and meaningful economic growth on the continent.

She said Rwanda attached great value in generating timely, reliable and relevant agricultural statistics for effective strategic formulation, planning and monitoring of various development interventions in the agricultural sector.

The Kigali meeting also took note of the main findings of the State of Food Insecurity in World 2015 report, and the achievement of the MDG 1 hunger target in many African countries. It requested detailed results of the report at national level.

Patric Mweniki, of Kenya said: "If we implement the 2020 census of agriculture, we will not only increase the statistics of Rwanda across the country but also on the global level”.

According to Josef Schmidhuber, FAO’s Deputy Director, Statistics Division in Rome, Italy, within FAO, statistics continue to gain an ever-higher priority and benefits from greater internal coordination.

At global level, he said, there is 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.

Only 24 countries in Africa have completed in-depth assessments or are at least expected to finish them very soon. Five additional in-depths assessments are planned for 2016. The current EICV4 report states that agriculture, which employs most Rwandans, contributes 33 percent to Rwanda’s GDP.

It also reveals that food crop production has grown more than twice 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.