The relation between ICT and poverty reduction : the Central Statistical Agency of Ethiopia

[摘要] ENGLISH ABSTRACT:National Statistical offices (NSOs) are the sources of wide ranges of socio-economic,demographic and agricultural data and information that are used to monitor and evaluatedevelopment programs and formulate policies. The data generated by NSOs is used as basisfor making decisions and also used to assess the extent and causes of poverty. Variousstakeholders such as researchers, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the UN,and various NGOs prepare and release research materials and annual reports using data andinformation obtained from NSOs and line ministries. For example, Deneulin and Shahanistate that one of the intentions of the annual Human Development Report (HDR) prepared bythe UNDP is 'to assess the quality of life of a population and be an advocacy tool for itsimprovement with a political purpose of raising awareness and generating debate on publicissues and concerns which would otherwise not be on the political agenda1. Based on thedifferent approaches to poverty, different sets of data and information are produced and usedfor poverty measurement. Mostly, poverty is measured using data obtained from nationallyrepresentative household surveys which focus on income and expenditure, ownership, accessto and use of some basic services. Another approach uses data on mental satisfaction; stillothers assume poverty to be multi-dimensional and argue that income alone is not enough.They view poverty as deprivation of basic capabilities due to high rates of mortality,illiteracy, malnourishment, unemployment, ill health, lack of education and social exclusion,etc2. The quality of data and information (such as integrity, methodological soundness,accuracy and reliability, serviceability and accessibility) generated by data-producingagenciestherefore needs to be preserved and improved in order to obtain meaningful resultsfrom the measurement of poverty in any of the approaches and to satisfy the growing dataquality demands of stakeholders. Loshin states that 'strategic decisions based onuntrustworthy information are likely to result in poor decisions3. This study focuses on therole played by national statistical offices in poverty reduction in general. It examines thevarious activities, players, interactions, and ICTs used at the various stages of the statistical process in the Ethiopian Central Statistical Agency (CSA) to generate poverty-related dataand information and how the quality of this data can be preserved and improved.The purpose of this research is therefore to identify poverty related data quality problemswith respect to the IMF's DQAF and assess where in the statistical process specific types ofICTs can improve data quality. For this reason interpretive case study method with theresearcher as participant observer was adopted to study how poverty related data andinformation is produced. It was found out that some of the data quality problems can beaddressed using appropriate ICTs with the availability of reliable power infrastructures.

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University