United Nations Statistical Commission
Overview 52nd Session (2021) Side events
Administrative data collected by governments and service providers in their day-to-day business is an increasingly important source to produce official statistics. There is an urgent need to strengthen the capacity of national statistical systems to leverage the use of administrative data for statistical purposes, to fill gaps in the data available to policy and decision makers to monitor progress and implement the 2030 Agenda.
The Collaborative on Administrative data led by the UNSD and GPSDD was established in 2020 to respond to this challenge. The collaborative brings together stakeholders from countries and regional and international agencies and is a space for learning and sharing to strengthen the capacity of countries to produce and use administrative data sources for statistical purposes. Members of the Collaborative work together in a coherent and cross-cutting manner to address both urgent and longer-term needs, building on advances made in various sectors and by different partners.
A concrete output of this is the inventory of resources that was recently launched which aims at making various materials and tools on the use of administrative data more easily available. The inventory includes international recommendations, regional and national reports, e-learning, webinars, tools and concrete case studies from countries on how they have worked to increase their use of administrative data. While it currently is work in progress and only contains materials in English, it is a goal to make it multilingual and to add more materials and functionalities moving forward
Scope
This session aims to introduce the work of the collaborative to the UN Statistical Commission as well as present itself as an opportunity to invite other National Statistical Offices (NSOs) and producers of administrative data to join the collaborative.
Participants will learn more about the Administrative Data collaborative and hear from members of this collaborative on the achievements so far, the work ahead and how they can get involved. Specifically, this session will discuss:
- 1) Why promoting the quality and use of administrative is important for NSOs and the gap that this collaborative helps to fill.
- 2) The achievements so far from the three task teams of the collaborative and what the future holds for the collaborative.
- 3) Opportunities and ways to further promote the use of administrative data.
This will also feed into the work of the Collaborative on Administrative Data currently ongoing to develop concrete workplans for its task teams which again will feed into an overall longer-term strategy. The strategy is expected to guide the work of the collaborative onward and will address longer-term needs to access and use administrative data for statistical purposes in a coherent and cross-cutting manner, building on advances made in various sectors and by different partners.
This session will underscore the need for collaboration between governments; NSOs and producers of administrative data (ministries and agencies) in collectively supporting statistical capacity development.