KAMPALA - Statistics experts at the fifth international conference on agricultural statistics yesterday disagreed on the way forward towards jointly conducting population census and establishing statistics on agriculture in Africa.

The conference running under the theme, ‘integrating agriculture into national statistical systems’ attracted over 200 delegates from 77 countries.

While some officials called for the joint conduction of population and agricultural statistics, others differed saying that the two are huge tasks which cannot be combined.

"To make these two operationally successful, they have to be independently conducted,” argued Professor Jose Mathai, the head of the department of Applied Statistics at the National University of Rwanda (NUR)

Pierre Claver Rutayisire, a statistician from NUR, said that when jointly conducted, this would lead to unnecessary wastage of time.

But John Male Kiwanuka, the Executive Director of the Uganda Bureau of Statistics (UBOA) argued that since many African households rely on agriculture, it would be easy to count people and at the same time find statistics on their agricultural productivity.

"It’s only through this way that we can establish the indicators of food security because most of our people rely on agriculture,” he said.

However, participants agreed that there is still limited capacity and inadequate resources and equipment to carry out statistical work in many parts of Africa.  

Kiwanuka revealed shortly after the conference yesterday that donors had promised to provide more funds to cater for the challenges.

Rutayisire underscored the need for setting up statistical associations in different countries, adding that it is only such groups that can do advocacy work for national statistics agencies.

"There is dire need for training, advocacy as well as doing analysis on statistics.  The only solution here on building capacity should be through setting up statistical associations which are currently inadequate in Africa,” he said.

The conference also recommended that assessment of country needs and capabilities be conducted as a top priority activity on the agenda of the implementation plan for Africa.

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