The School of Statistics and Planning has been urged to embrace digitalisation of data analysis as a way of modernising national statistical systems to support sociocultural development in Africa.
The call was made by Prof. Ben Kiregyera, a senior statistician and researcher, during a symposium to mark the Africa Statistics Day held 18th November 2021 at Makerere University.
The symposium was organised by the School of Statistics and Planning in partnership with Uganda Bureau of Statistics (UBoS) and the Uganda Statistics Society (USS), under the theme “Modernizing National Statistical Systems to support sociocultural development in Africa.”
The keynote speaker, Prof. Kiregyera pointed that there is a lot of delay and laxity in collection and delivering real time data to the public by the responsible bodies which jeopardises the work of other bodies that use this same data e.g. the Central Bank and other institutions.
He believes this can be addressed in various ways like scaling up of Statistics advocacy, statistical literacy, extending frontiers to the traditional,national systems through embracing the new data sources that include telecom data, E_ commerce, Web crawling, Social Media and GIS.
Countries in the East Africa that have since migrated digitally in terms of data analysis include Rwanda that uses tabs which are assembled within the country by university students as well as Kenya.
The Professor pointed out that the demand for data analysts in America is higher than that of statisticians something that should push all the statisticians to embrace new skills to increase their competence in a very fast changing world that doesn’t need manual work but digital. This he said can be achieved through building new data sources,capacity building in data science as well as producing more data scientists.
Speaking at the opening the symposium, the Principal of the College of Business and Management Sciences, Prof. Eria Hisali said the college intends to launch an initiative dabbed the “The policy Lab series.” Witch will attract dignitaries especially policy makers from Parliament, cabinet, senior civil servants and academia to meetings to address various issues affecting the economy of the country.
Prof. Hisali added that the college had created a unit specifically for data management, in it’s infancy as young as 3 years, intending to support agencies in data analysis.
“We have been able to run courses in computer management and impact evaluation that attracted over 60 students from various parts of the world,” he said.
Responding to the Principal, the Minister of State for Planning, Hon. Amos Lugoloobi, who was the guest of honor noted that over the years there has been a gap in dissemination of the service to the public and if such future plans are fulfilled then the college will have played a very big role in developing the economy of this country.
The Dean of the School of Statistics and Planning, Dr. James Wokadala, thanked his staff for their continued contribution to training statisticians in the country. Dr. Wokadala called upon statisticians to be aggressive, proactive and vigilant to fill any gap in the economy even when they are not called upon. The School of Statistics and Planning has been in existence since 1968 and has so far and trained over 2,200 undergraduate students with 5 programmes and 9 post graduate programmes with 3,030 students, the Dean noted.
Written by Betty Kyakuwa