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In the past year, President Mbeki presented us with a vision for economic recovery in Africa. This vision rests on the foundations of democratic governance. It emphasises sound and sustainable economic policies. It puts the needs of the poor first. In view of the message about democratic governance that our President has taken to the British Government last week, this House should note our own substantial commitments to the development of our region and our continent.

Let me focus on how some of these domestic improvements and commitments relate to this vision.

This government has a vision of a better life for all. This ideal should not be lost as we move towards globalisation and increasing competition with other countries.

This commitment to improving life circumstances for all should be underpinned by timely, accurate, reliable official statistics.

Stats SA is in line with government policy. It is compliant with SADC protocols, and it is meeting its international obligations of integration into the regional and the world economy.

The apartheid era saw a fragmentation of the statistical system, resulting in poor quality statistics, designed to support the interests of the white elite, rather than providing an accurate picture of the social, economic and demographic situation of all of South Africa's people.

The quest for best statistical practice has, within a very short period of time, made an impact. We are pleased to report that in May this year, South Africa was elected as a member of the United Nations Statistics Commission. We will accordingly be giving statistical advice to the UN Social and Economic Commission, who meet annually, to review how well the international community is served by statistical systems.

Regionally we have done well in terms of being a focal point for the SADC 2000/1 round of censuses. We have contributed to the efforts of the SADC Secretariat in marshalling both intellectual and material resources for harmonising on measurements relating to demographics and economics. We have also taken the lead in time-use studies, which amongst other issues, highlights unpaid female labour. We shall be sharing these important findings nationally and in SADC shortly.

In 1996, we subscribed to the IMF's Special Data Dissemination Standards (SDDS). This is a very strict data integrity requirement for member states. It is meant to improve the effectiveness of the Fund's surveillance system. The SDDS is also meant to inform sound macroeconomic policies. The improvement of information flow facilitates confidence in our financial markets. South Africa is the only African country to have subscribed to the SDDS and one of the very few countries to have fully complied, within the set timeframe.

A massive revitalisation of official statistics took place between 1995 to date. A key element was an increase in both the number and the quality of statistical products. Entire sets of statistics have been re-engineered to ensure compliance with the IMF's Special Data Dissemination Standards (SDDS).

In keeping with our commitment to transparency and adherence to these international standards, we have agreed to an assessment of our economic and financial data, which has resulted in a preliminary IMF Report on Observance of Standards and Codes (ROSC). In addition to validating the statistical standards with which we comply, this report will assist the Treasury, Statistics South Africa and the Reserve Bank in identifying priorities for further improvements.

We have also boldly subjected ourselves to further scrutiny, by accepting to be part of a pilot exercise of the IMF and the World Bank, under their Financial Sector Assessment Programme (FSAP) in 1998. Since 1999, three FSAPs have been produced, all of which confirm a general soundness of the financial system, and see no risks to macroeconomic stability.

Stats SA entered into a wide range of collaborative activities with other departments, which ranged from the construction of a national spatial database to user driven household surveys and a census that provides provincial breakdowns of social and economic characteristics of our population. Another noteworthy crosscutting initiative has been the creation of the Business Register (BR) infrastructure, developed together with the South African Revenue Service (SARS), to facilitate a better sampling frame.

These efforts culminated in the passing of a new Statistics Act in 1999. Subsequently, Stats SA was given full departmental status and the appointment of a Statistician General was made in January 2001.

The benefits of these developments have been in the deepening of democracy. The Demarcation Board in their delimitation of local government boundaries to a large extent applied the data from the census and other surveys conducted by Statistics South Africa. The allocation of budgets, although not exclusively, are driven by the population numbers, particularly indigent policies.

Despite these achievements, there is need to review the outputs of the organisation in greater detail. Our commitment to transparency demands that we test these in terms of their veracity and robustness, methodology, quality and relevance. In this vein, the new Statistics Council, who are the watchdog of the output of the system, have put up an ambitious programme of reviews of Stats SA products and data, and have started with the labour statistics series.

Stats SA's quest for providing a broad range of sustainable quality statistics is underpinned by the need and justification for creating a National Statistics System (NSS). There are three main considerations that can impact negatively when such a system does not exist, or when it is ineffective. The first is the financial and quality implications of a system based on a model that has stand-alone-silos and duplicates measurement across themes and silos. The second, a corollary to the first, is the political cost of failing to report accurately and timeously, and therefore failing to manage and being accountable. The third is the cost of making inappropriate policy decisions due to a dearth of cohesive data.

The NSS aims to enhance the capacity of the state to formulate and evaluate policy decisions based on appropriate and quality data. This will be achieved through the creation of an integrated network of state institutions. To this end we will improve on the existing relations and infrastructure in the provinces.

Researchers and policy makers in a range of government departments are to be jointly trained under the auspices of SAMDI in conjunction with Stats SA to enhance usage of statistics. In this regard, we are exploring the creation of an institution in South Africa that will train in official statistics. It is sad to note that there is no institution in South Africa that teaches official statistics. In the meantime therefore, arrangements for training our staff in official statistics are at an advanced stage in partnership with other reputable regional institutions, such as the Institute of Statistics and Applied Economics at Makerere University and the East African Statistical Training Centre in Tanzania. If these countries contributed to South Africa in military training for freedom in the past, this time around they will contribute in statistical training for social development. Achieving economic literacy, a passion of the President, is predicated upon achieving statistical literacy.

Stats SA will continue to engage in a series of activities to improve its statistical collections during the financial year 2001/2. To this end, Stats SA will meet the pre-conditions to the successful collection and dissemination of statistics namely, compiling a regularly up-dated, comprehensive business register and conducting a well-run population census for providing the basic tools for drawing samples.

Census 2001:

An immediate challenge to the organisation is the mounting of the second census of the population under democratic rule. This the Minister of Finance launched in the National Assembly recently as part of a massive campaign calling on citizens to participate. Launches have been made by premiers in seven provinces to date. The eighth is taking place in Gauteng tomorrow. I wish to thank premiers for having taken this task in the spirit it commands. The census at schools project, a joint initiative between Department of Education and Stats SA, is being implemented successfully throughout the provincial administrations. The objective of this operation is firstly to promote awareness amongst the public about the forthcoming census, and more importantly, as a significant first step towards entrenching statistical literacy in society. Census 2001 besides providing information for benchmarking progress and identifying areas that require further development marks a big leap forward in terms of technological innovation that will benefit the broader society. With a geographic information system toolkit, we will be able, to easily access and visualise data on the state of affairs in our constituencies. Through Census 2001, we are introducing new technology by scanning documents or questionnaires on a grand scale. The benefits of this system are being explored favourably for all paper-based processing in Stats SA. It has been offered to SARS and Home Affairs.

Government strategies and official statistics: meeting user needs

In the context of the macro-economic policy of the government, the drive for job creation, and the delivery of social services, government has identified four broad strategies. Stats SA has the responsibility to provide common statistical denominators at both geographic and thematic levels that operationalise, monitor, and measure the outcomes and impact of the policies and strategies that government embarks on as priorities. We outline some of these priorities below and postulate how we intend relating to them.
Integrated sustainable rural development strategy

The vision for rural development is to eliminate poverty and enable development through focussing on the provision of infrastructure and services in rural areas and restoring economic rights to marginalised areas.

Poverty and agricultural activity statistics are critical to ensuring sound policy formulation, implementation and monitoring. Geographically referenced small area statistics enable targeted interventions. The current challenge to both the national statistics system and government is how well the national denominators are collated, progress is monitored, performance is measured, intended outcomes and impact are measured and understood. Stats SA in conjunction with the DPLG and IDT are conducting a benchmark study in the 13 nodal areas and will be rolling out more benchmark studies to inform policy on the state of affairs and what needs attention.
Urban renewal strategy

Crime and poverty are to be tackled together in high-density urban areas. Continued unemployment and poverty provide a fertile environment for crime, which is to be tackled by an integrated justice strategy.

Economic statistics, especially on labour market dynamics at lower levels of geography, coupled with small area statistics on service delivery, provide critical information for local, provincial and national government programmes. The challenge to the statistics system is even more complex in this area, as the demand for small area statistics become increasingly pressing and the direction of resource flows and benefits have need to be tracked.
Public sector transformation

Effective service delivery in the spirit of Batho Pele is the primary goal of public service transformation.

Developing the statistics system and enhancing the quality of statistics not only provides delivery of better statistical services, but also allows government departments to plan and monitor the inputs and outputs of their own service delivery. In addition, an emphasis on the development of Stats SA's human resource capacity provides for the sustainability of quality initiatives.

Some Policy Questions

Based on the October Household Surveys series, Stats SA has just completed a five-year comparative analysis of data measuring the extent of development in South Africa.

In the area of housing the data suggests that although there is improvement in the type of housing people live in, there is a simultaneous increase in the number of informal or "shack dwellings." For instance, the proportion of formal housing increased from 65% of all housing in 1995 to 69% in 1999. At the same time the number of shacks increased from 7.5% to 12.3%. This constitutes a major challenge that the cluster looking at housing and associated services will have to tackle. The proportion of the population in urban areas exhibit two related patterns which is predominant only amongst the black population group. The one pattern is the level of urbanisation and the other is the trend. As regards the level, the proportion urban is at its peak in the age range 25-49, and the trend suggests that within this age group, a disproportionately large number of people migrate to urban areas and move back to rural areas when they exit age 50. This pattern of movement has a higher peak for men than it is for women and it is 59% and 54% respectively. This suggests that the policy of apartheid still continue to have far reaching implications on our society. A related policy question is that of: in which ways does massive migration affect capital formation say, in policies geared towards addressing home ownership?

The comparative analysis also shows improvements in access to clean water, whereby the statistics point out to an increase from 78% in 1995 to 83% in 1999. Access to water from boreholes has declined from 10% in 1995 to 4.7% in 1999. However, the analysis also shows that the situation has not changed for those who have historically accessed water from streams. In this area the percentage has remained constant at approximately 11% from 1995 to 1999. A key policy issue would be whether the deep rural communities have been adequately reached with water supply?

A related subject is that of sanitation, where access to more hygienic methods of waste disposal including toilets show that, from 1995 to 1999, 55% of households have local authority structures as the mechanism by which waste is disposed. There has been an increase in the percentage of individual households taking on private arrangements for waste disposal. The analysis shows that this has increased from 31% in 1995, to 37% in 1999. Access to flush latrines is as yet not universal and in 1999 remains at 1995 levels of 55%. Pitlaterines are at 30% while the bucket system has declined from 5% to about 3% over the period. Communicable diseases and particularly cholera outbreaks become the key policy issue.

There has been an increase in the number of households with access to electricity for lighting, this increased from 60% in 1995 to 69% in 1999. However, as far as cooking, the percentage using electricity has somewhat declined from 55% to 52% over the same period and the shift has been towards using paraffin, and the respective percentages have been 14% to 21% over the same period. A policy issue would be the pricing of paraffin and electricity for the more vulnerable. Means of telecommunications have improved, with households having access to telephones in dwellings increasing form 29% in 1995 to 34% in 1999.

Improvements in reporting

Stats SA, in common with other statistical agencies throughout the world, is moving away from collecting and publishing isolated data and unrelated series of figures, towards publishing useful, integrated information for policy and planning. It is looking at methods of explaining what, if any, changes have taken place over time, and what the statistical implications of such changes are. Furthermore it is looking at a matrix structure, where the various sets of data are confronted to generate a unified view in all its publications. Through data confrontation continual improvements can be achieved.

New proposed structure

The new organisational structure will promote a more responsive, professional organisation focussed on the needs of users. It has three broad work areas: product output, statistical support, and organisation and management.

Product output

The main areas of product output are economic statistics, population statistics and social statistics. These areas of product output are to a large extent already established in Stats SA. Improved co-ordination in these areas should ensure greater and more direct relationships with government policy-formulation, programs and activities.

Statistical support

Statistical support areas consist of Provincial Offices, Quality and Methodology, Informatics, NSS Co-ordination, Marketing and Dissemination. These areas will formulate quality standards and ensure their application in official statistics produced by Stats SA and other government departments. The use of information technology, especially geographical information systems and data warehousing, will lead to the promotion of analysis, reporting and access at all levels of geography.

Organisation and management

Stats SA's ability as a government department to perform in a sustainable manner within the government policies and within allocated resources is largely dependent on strong organisation and management. Furthermore, Stats SA's census and survey programmes necessitate effective and efficient organisation and management support systems including new emphasis on project management. Organisation and management mainly consists of strategic planning, human resources, finance and provisioning administration.

Conclusion

We are pleased that this organisation has demonstrated beyond doubt that it is resilient and adapts to change. In the past five years, it has revitalised the statistics system and given sufficient prominence to social and demographic statistics. Created a census database that emulates that of countries that have been ahead of us. It has re-engineered economic statistics and continues to address the limitations that exist across series especially those relating to employment. In terms of regional obligations we have taken the lead and SADC has assigned South Africa the task of being the focal point for the SADC 2000 Round of Censuses.

The organisation is well poised for executing Census 2001 and has led the way in encouraging participation at all levels of society. The voice of the NCOP is called upon to support Census 2001 and support for Stats SA.

Although the challenges are extensive, the vision is clear, the direction has been defined and there is substantial movement in that direction.

Issued by Statistics South Africa

20 June 2001