International Development: Growing a Global Statistical System

In this episode, we explore ONS’s work with other countries to raise the world's statistical capabilities.

Transcript

MILES FLETCHER

Hello and welcome again to ‘Statistically Speaking’, the Office for National Statistics’ Podcast. I'm Miles Fletcher, and in this episode we're going international.

Now it hardly needs saying that global issues, climate change, population growth, inflation, to name a few are best understood and addressed with the benefit of good global statistics. So, to that end, the ONS works in partnership with a number of countries worldwide with the ultimate aim of raising the world's statistical capabilities. At the one end of Africa, for example, a continent where it’s deeply involved, that includes embedding state of the art inflation indices and other economic data in Ghana. On the other side of the continent, it's meant using AI and machine learning to track the movement of displaced populations in Somalia. How do you run a census in places where nobody has a permanent address?

It's all fascinating work and here to tell us about it, Emily Poskett, Head of International Development at the ONS; Tim Harris of the ONS Data Science Campus’s international development team; and joining us from Accra, our special guest, Government Statistician of the Republic of Ghana and head of the Ghanaian Statistical Service Professor Samuel Annim.

Emily then, to start give us the big overview if you would, set out for us the scale and the purpose of this international development work that the ONS is doing.

EMILY POSKETT

We work with countries around the developing world to support strong modern statistical systems wherever we see a suitable opportunity to do so.

MF

What form does that work take? Does it mean statisticians going out to these countries?

EP

Yes, it does, when that's the right way to go about things. So our work is usually through the form of medium-term partnerships with a small group of national statistical offices, or NSOs, from the developing world, and those partnerships are medium term over a number of years in order to build up a real understanding of the context in that country, that national statistical office’s vision for modernization and how the ONS can be of most help to achieve their own goals under their own strategy.

That relationship will normally be led by a particular individual who spends time getting to know the context and getting to know the people, getting to know what ONS can do to help. A partnership might cover a range of topic areas from census to data science to leadership training to economic statistics, and the lead point of contact, the strategic advisor in many cases, will bring in the relevant experts from across ONS, and they'll work through virtual collaboration but also through on-site visits, and they will work out the best timing for those and the best delivery modality in order to ensure that the gains are sustained. Our primary focus really is to make sure that changes that we support in the partner organisation are sustainable, and the work that ONS does using the UK’s aid budget is really impactful and leads to long term change.

We don't always work through direct partnerships, for example where we see opportunities to work alongside other organisations, so international institutions like the World Bank or other national statistics offices like Statistics Canada or Statistics Sweden, they might choose to bring us in to deliver small pieces of focussed technical assistance alongside their own programmes. One of our medium-term partnerships is with the United Nations Economic Commission For Africa (UNECA), and they work with all 54 countries of Africa, and they can choose to bring in our expertise alongside their own to target particular needs in particular countries. But I would say that 70% of our effort is through these medium-term partnerships.

MF

So the ONS is providing one part of a large patchwork of work, going on right across the developing world, but what is the ultimate purpose of that? What are all these countries trying to achieve together?

EP

Well, strong statistical systems are essential in all countries to aid effective planning and informed decision making. And this is even more important in developing countries where resources are often scarce and you're trying to use scarce resources to target a wide range of needs across the population. And that resource might include UK aid for example, and aid from other countries. The UK has been statistical capacity building for many, many years through different modalities, working with partners, and the ONS is just one implementing partner who can be called upon to provide that technical expertise. We're really proud to be a partner of choice for a number of developing countries and the ONS is seen worldwide as being a leader. We're really ...