The name is absent

246

III. Suggestions and recommendations

As mentioned at the outset, Zambia has a large data system which has received support from
various donors over the years. Unfortunately, donor support has been spasmodic and not sustained.
The system has not been held to high standards of cost-effectiveness, efficiency, accuracy, or
timeliness. The following are some suggestions of how to improve performance in these areas.

A. Improving cost-effectiveness

The overriding need in the Zambian agricultural data system is to work toward a more
cohesive, organized data system that emphasizes collecting only data that has been substantially
justified. Currently, too many resources are flowing into a system that produces many, but not
necessarily usable, results." It appears the system has been allowed to accept more and more
requests for data without a thorough review of necessity. Publications are often delayed due to the
inability to summarize the unwieldy quantity of data.

It is not uncommon for large national surveys to become vehicles for collecting increasing
amounts of data. The CSO's survey questionnaires have become laden with many interesting but
inappropriate questions. To rectify the situation, every survey instrument used in Zambia should be
forced to pass a rigorous evaluation process that would allow only the most essential items to remain
on the questionnaires. ¹⁸ Eliminating questions that have been on questionnaires for a number of years
will be difficult, but it is an essential step in making the surveys more accurate sources of information.
Even when troubles are well known, problems of institutional rigidity, lack of resources, lack of skills,
or complacency lead to inaction. Scott mentions a CSO "user-producer seminar on government
statistics" scheduled for May 1990 (Scott 1990). According to CSO management, that seminar was
held, but no changes were made to the surveys by way of follow-through.

Data collection should be trimmed to an absolute minimum. The specific data to be collected
should be determined at a series of data user conferences where the realities of data collection and
publication are discussed. Organizations requesting data must be convinced that less-extensive, higher-
quality data sets are of more value than the more detailed, but questionable, statistics currently being
collected. Data users who want to maintain current levels of data collection should be asked for
specific examples of where published data are used. Only those data sets which have a proven current
use should be allowed to continue. It is difficult to believe that the detailed structural/size group data
collected by both the MAFF and the CSO are necessary every year. Usually collection of these data
every three to five years is sufficient. Following thorough review, data from other sources, such as
parastatals and marketing boards, should continue to be published by the CSO. These data provide the
only comparisons to the survey data published in Zambia.

' ⁷ Based on requests it has received from users, CSO officials believe that most of the data collected is usable. Rather,
it is the long lag between data collection and publication that diminishes the data's usefulness.

' The CSO's comprehensive agricultural survey described by Scott (1990) was not reviewed as a part of this study.
Given the extreme amount of data collected by the survey, the exercise sounds like an ill-conceived use of resources. The
level of detail collected by the survey is normally restricted to specialized research studies and is seldom deemed cost-
effective at the national level.

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