Cambodia improve the ability of collecting administrative data

By Sok Lak

The National Institutes of Statistics at Ministry of Planning in cooperation with Europe Union (EU) to organize Training workshop on “Socio-Economic data collection using administrative data sources” to strengthen the ability in collecting data through using administrative data sources on April 11-12 in Phnom Penh.

H.E Chhay Than, Senior Minister of Ministry of Planning said that the need of socio-economic data in Cambodia is increasing very fast in recent decade for the government, national and international organization to set up policy, national planning, decision making, control and evaluate the effective of implement policies to ensure macroeconomic stability, sustainable development and poverty reduction in Cambodia.

The increasing of needs in using survey data and administrative data is show the economy and social development in country with national and international integration of Cambodia, he added.

Socio-Economic data collection using administrative data sources is still being the issues in country especially the quality of data, collection time and interrupted process.

Nowadays, Cambodia need data increasingly especially need good quality administrative data, which is the important data source when the absence of census and other survey.

“I believe that this workshop and training will provide a lot of benefit to improve the processing of statistics system better and better and it will become significant step to strengthen the quality of administrative data, which is a part of formal national statistics as well as to development country.”

H.E. San Sy Than, Director General of the National Institutes of Statistics said that administrative data is an important part in constructing indicators in national statistics system.

He continue to say that Socio-Economic data use for planning national and under-national development strategy to monitoring achievements of Cambodian Millennium Development Goals and evaluate other policies. Socio-Economic data that constructed by Ministries, institutions, cities and provinces nowadays have a large scale and potential, but Cambodia cannot prepare them as a system to encode, decode and store follow the standard in order to be easy for readers and users  to use.

Through the attention of government and development partner on the national institute of  statistics, many achievements appear from year to year especially population census 2008 and industrial census 2011.

The training workshop covered the using provincial administrative data for improving national accounts of Cambodia, the using of provincial administrative data for monitoring Cambodian Millennium Development Goals, hands on training on the data entry and application tools and wrap-up training.

Source: The Southeast Asia Weekly, April 17-22, 2011,Vol 5, Issue 16