By William Madouk
For 13 years, South Sudan has struggled with data collection and distribution, creating gaps that hinder effective planning. Statistical data is crucial for improving public services and ensuring policies address the needs of vulnerable groups. However, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), tasked with this responsibility, faces challenges due to underfunding. NBS Director General Dr. Augustino Ting Mayai highlighted these issues during a media briefing ahead of African Statistics Day.
“As we celebrate this year’s ASD, our natural statistical system remains challenged. This is marked by limited resources, lack of statistics units across various institutions, poor record keeping, inadequate infrastructure, and limited human resources capacity,” he lamented.
ASD is an annual event celebrated on the 18th of November each year; however, South Sudan could not celebrate this year’s ASD – due to other competing priorities, says Ting.
This year’s ASD theme is: “Supporting education by modernizing production of fit-for-purpose statistics.”
According to Data experts, this is aligned with the African Union theme of educating and scaling Africa for the 21st century, which calls for modernizing data ecosystems in the continent for the production and utilization of high-quality official statistics, improving learning opportunities and quality for all children.
“In South Sudan, this statistics day is intended to ignite a public debate that is aimed at building a culture of evidence-based policymaking or decision making, especially in the area of education,” the NBS boss noted.
He cited that a modernized data system helps South Sudan better understand its performance in education, including enrolment, attendance, completion, quality of learning, access, equity, and resources required for purposive learning.
He stated that persistent conflict hampered the Bureau of Statistics in carrying out its mandate.
“Over the years, there have been challenges for us to realize all the objectives for which the Bureau was set up,” he stated.
“One of the factors that has led to that is the conflict in the country, diverting resources away from development. And as a result, we have had limited effort at producing the statistics,” he added.
Mr. Ting revealed that his docket has partnered with various global institutions, including UNFPA, UNDP, FAO, the World Bank and the Ministry of Finance, to promote evidence-based decision-making that impacts educational reforms and fosters data-driven development planning in South Sudan.
According to him, with relative peace in the country, the National Bureau of Statistics is now undertaking a key step to realize good data collection that will be disseminated to the public.
“Number one is to build a statistical system nationwide, and this is under what is known NSDS-2, and that’s basically the development statistics in the country – and this covers all the data producing, data users in the country,” he revealed.
“Secondly, we are working on a repository – a repository, in this case, is a place where it’s a stop-center where you can go for dashboards, where you can go for all statistics.”