UN Economic Commission For Africa On Rwanda

Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 22 August 2019 (ECA) The United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, through its African Centre for Statistics works with its member States to improve the production, dissemination and use of quality statistics for evidence-based planning and policy-making in support of Africa’s structural transformation, the sustainable development agenda and the AU Agenda 2063, the Africa we want.

Over the years we have witnessed Rwanda’s consistent efforts in developing and strengthening its statistical system and improving the quality of official statistics. Using international principles and recommendations, the country has formulated the National Strategy for Development of Statistics for the period of 2014/15-2018/19 in its determination to improve data and statistics.

In economic statistics, the country has made tremendous progress in the production and dissemination of statistics, such as the Supply-Use Tables, to help validate GDP estimates. It has also worked with development partners, including our African Centre for Statistics, to continuously build the technical capacity of its staff members.

With the increasing demand for statistics, especially in this era of SDGs, more will be demanded of national statistical offices to continuously review the methodologies including identifying new data sources for areas where critical data may be lacking.

GDP measurement and compilation is a complex undertaking, entailing the use of different sources of data, including data from household expenditure surveys to measure household consumption and poverty estimates. Household survey data are complemented and/adjusted with additional source data, to get the complete Final Household Consumption as an input to GDP. Rwanda uses (standard) international methodology as prescribed in the 2008 SNA for this purpose.

ECA is committed to continue its support to Member States to improve and adhere to internationally accepted statistical norms and standards, including reviewing the robustness of the statistical system in order to continue producing reliable, quality and timely statistics which comply to UN Fundamental Principles of Official Statistics, Strategy for Harmonizing Statistics in Africa and the African Charter on Statistics.

We welcome objective discussions which further support the strengthening of the statistical system of Rwanda.

Issued by:

Communications Section

Economic Commission for Africa