On behalf of the Government and People of the Republic of Ghana, I warmly welcome you to the city of Accra and to the first and largest conference ever in Africa dedicated to the topic of enhancing data for better macroeconomic and financial policies. We are very pleased to be collaborating with the IMF and the United Kingdom Department for International Development (DFID) to discuss this important topic and I am particularly delighted to host this gathering of high-level policy colleagues from across the continent. The broad attendance from senior policymakers from all parts of Africa is testimony to how important the topic of today’s discussion is for all of us: Better data for better policies!
It is my hope that we will have an open conversation, a frank exchange of views, and learn from each other on the challenges and success stories on how data was made more accurate and how those data have been useful in improving our policies. The rich diversity of our experiences, collectively, can tell us what kinds of data are the most important, where we can focus our energies to make those data better, where the most serious challenges and bottlenecks are, and how we can improve the ways we use those data to make the best policy decisions possible.
To do this, we will also look to our partners in these efforts, such as the IMF with its considerable technical expertise and who has been providing technical assistance and training to all of us in the many domains of macroeconomic and financial statistics, such as national accounts, price statistics, government finance, monetary and external sector statistics, and increasingly also on how to disseminate those data.
In this process, the IMF has collaborated with several development partners, most notably DFID that has supported the Enhance Data Dissemination Initiative (EDDI) over the last five years and is now entering into its second five-year phase, with even more beneficiary countries. For example, under this project, Ghana recently completed a private sector capital flow survey that will be used to help us strengthen our balance of payments and international investment position measurements. We also now compile and publish quarterly national accounts statistics. In the recently started successor project, EDDI2 , we plan to focus on monetary statistics, financial soundness indicators and data dissemination. I know that many of you also benefited from this generous support from DFID, which has also been complemented by technical assistance and training on key statistical issues offered by the IMF’s five African Technical Assistance Centers that cover almost every country on the continent.
All of our efforts to strengthen our statistical framework contributes to enhancing our capacity to implement better policies. It also enhances our relationships with credit rating agencies and markets, allowing us to improve our access to financing.
