Advanced data planning tool evolution to adapt statistical needs

A Partnership in Statistics for 21st Century Data Use
Tanzania

Background

In 1999, the European Commission, International Monetary Fund, Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, United Nations, and the World Bank established the Partnership in Statistics for Development in the 21st Century (PARIS21) with the purpose of creating a global partnership to improve evidence-based decision making for sustainable development.

PARIS21 is responding to this charge by strengthening national and regional statistical systems and promoting the wider use of statistics. PARIS21 works in more than 90 countries across Africa, Asia-Pacific, Central Europe and Latin America and the Caribbean on projects including strengthening statistical systems, developing innovative tools for statistics, and advocating for statistics.

The Advanced Data Planning Tool (ADAPT) that PARIS21 has developed is a cloud-based platform that supports national statistical offices (NSOs) to map data demands, identify gaps in data and skills/capacity existing in the national statistical system, and help to plan for data collection. ADAPT was piloted in 2017 in ten countries, including Tanzania, with the purpose of assessing the ability of countries’ national development plan logical framework to report on Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) indicators through creation of an SDG data roadmap.

Problem

In its pilots, ADAPT was designed to assess data gaps in the national development plan framework and to highlight the alignment of the plan’s indicators to the SDG indicators. In Tanzania, the Tanzania Data Lab data (dLab) supported the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) and Office of Chief Government Statistician (OCGS) of Zanzibar to create SDG data roadmaps in ADAPT. As a pioneer in this process, the Tanzanian team was able to identify a number of areas of need that ADAPT could not yet address. These included:

• Ability of the tool to translate the populated country M&E monitoring frameworks into respective country language context
• Ability for the tool to translate SDG indicators reported by regional plans (eg Africa Agenda 2063) in the formats that could be reported at a country level
• Changing the ADAPT business process approach from SDG centered to statistical data demand and supply needs of the country plan(s)
• Ability of the tool to analyze multiple country plans in a single instance launch
• A reporting module with better visualizations to help with gaps analysis of the plans
• An advanced costing module to help better plan for data collection cost estimates

Solution

After evaluating the requests coming from NBS and OCGS through dLab data science team, PARIS21 decided there was a need to upgrade the system to create a more versatile and robust system that could better accommodate the needs identified by the early adopters in Tanzania. Rolling out these upgrades would create a more powerful system better able to handle the demands of statistics offices around the world.

Process

The ADAPT evolution is an iterative one that involves gathering requirements, building out the system to address them, and issuing an updated release. ADAPT technical workshops conducted in Dodoma, Morogoro, Dar es Salaam, and Zanzibar gave NBS and OCGS team members an opportunity to collaboratively identify areas of need as they worked through the system. The PARIS21 team then implemented the changes, tested them thoroughly, and began to roll them out as updates to ADAPT. Eventually, the PARIS21 team will offer face-to-face trainings on these updates to the countries implementing ADAPT.

Outcomes and Impact

Tanzania’s pioneering of ADAPT has prompted changes that will result in the release of a more stable and flexible tool with a better reporting module and more visualizations in April 2018 to better addresses the needs of countries using ADAPT. In Tanzania, this new release will allow for integration of multiple plans – for both mainland Tanzania and Zanzibar – into a single SDG mapping system. ADAPT plans to scale up to reach an additional 10 countries by the end of 2018, and the recent changes will mean that these countries have access to a more robust tool with which to track progress on SDGs.

Key Collaborators

The ADAPT evolution process was highly influenced by the tool usage by National Statistical Offices of Tanzania. National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) spearheads SDG data roadmap implementation in Tanzania mainland most of the requirements came from NBS. http://nbs.go.tz/

Office of Chief Government Statisticians (OCGS) Zanzibar implements SDG data roadmap for Zanzibar isles and contributed one of the most important requirements on mapping more than one country plans in the same instance. http://ocgs.go.tz/

The dLab is promoting innovation and data literacy through a premier center of excellence. The partnership between dLab, PARIS21, OCGS and NBS has catalyzed the evolution of ADAPT as the dLab data science team is the technical lead in SDG data roadmap creation in Tanzania. http://www.dlab.or.tz

PARIS21 promotes the better and production of statistics through the developing world. PARIS21 team is the main developer of ADAPT tool and they are incharge of all the changes developed and incorporated in the tool. http://www.paris21.org/