EDWIN MOYO
GWERU-Zimbabwe National Statistics Agency ( Zimstats) has outlined its move to embrace digital technologies to enable easy data collection for its enumerators.
The move was highlighted by the Zimstats,Director General, Taguma Mahonde at a workshop for enumerators which was held in Gweru last week.
He further highlighted that the move was going to eliminate biases and increase reliability on statistical data.
“We know there are web based applications which are now being used across the world so we’re in the process of developing them. We are working with international bodies such as the African Union (AU) and World Bank(WB) to improve our skills and techniques and that would also aid us in having an enhanced response rate as well as in the general generation of statistics,” said Mahonde.
Mahonde highlighted that Zimstats was going to conduct training on a regular basis to keep enumerators abreast with global trends and improve on the quality of results.
He added that after the training of enumerators they would engage companies in a better fashion, and establish good working relations
“The agency is the main source of official statistics in Zimbabwe and is mandated to play a coordination and supervisory role within the National Statistical System and has the authority to certify any statistics produced in the country as official statistics
“As Zimstats we are concerned over the reluctance by companies in the country to provide adequate data during survey exercises leading to unreliable statistical conclusions.
“On the other hand we are facing challenges of obtaining adequate data to draw representative and reliable statistical conclusions,” he added.
Meanwhile, Zimstats urged companies and other institutions to provide data when needed saying the development was essential for national planning purposes.
“We are facing challenges of low response rate from companies during survey exercises. We give them, for example, 100 questionnaires and we struggle to get at least 70 responses. For us to have representative statistics we need a response rate of 70% and above.
“With household-based data and response rate there has been sufficient training and less challenges but we’re encountering problems with reference to company-based data collection enumeration. We want to solve that through capacitating our enumerators.” said Mahonde.
