From PRESS to CRESS Ethiopian Experience in the CRESS Pilot Exercise

1. From PRESS to CRESSEthiopian Experience in the CRESS Pilot Exercise FASDEV Meeting, 17 January 2012, Cape Town SA By SamiaZekaria

2. What is PRESS • PRESS : a snapshot of ongoing statistical support reported by partners, answering the questions of who, what, where and how much ?

3. The Background PRESS is • Consistent with the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness and its call for aligned and harmonized aid to developing countries, • It provides: • a tool for improved collaboration among donors supporting statistical development

4. PRESS Offers the Following Information • Current and planned statistical support from partners. • Statistical areas being supported. • The period covered by each activity. • The amount of money committed and disbursed.

5. Limitations • Not all donors report • Classification too detailed • Future activities unreliable • Double counting or over/under estimation

6. From PRESS to CRESS The CRESS is a country-led exercise to gather all data relating to the funding of the entire NSS whether deriving from national resources or donor support.

7. Objective of CRESS • The ultimate objective is to improve efficiency of the NSS through a better co-ordination and better information sharing.

8. Scope of CRESS The CRESS exercise covers activities funded by the country’s own resources as well as activities funded by financial and technical partners (FTPs). i.e., • Financing from national resources, budgetary or resources of NSS units • Use of loan/credits • Grants from FTPs (targeted budget support to a sector, aid projects, or statistical component of a program, for instance monitoring and evaluation)

9. The Uses of CRESS • informpolicymakers and financial and technical partners (FTPs) of the volume of support to statistics; • Provides useful information to strengthening and improving co-ordination; • identify the needs in terms of financing statistics including statistical capacity development; and • monitor the financing of FTPs;

10. Advantage of CRESS At country level CRESS has better coverage in identifying all data relating to the funding of the NSS whether this funding comes from national resources or from donor support unlike PRESS • Overcomes the limitation of PRESS

11. Data collection for CRESS Covers all activities of the NSS, including: • Recurring statistical production activities (e.g., administrative data collection); • One of data collection activities (e.g., surveys and censuses); • Dissemination and use of statistics

12. Experience of Ethiopia in piloting CRESS • CRESS is conducted and implemented by the Central Statistical Agency of Ethiopia • Period under consideration: 2009-2011

13. Experience of Ethiopia in piloting CRESS • 38 institutions were indentified in the NSS to be involved in the CRESS Exercise • The CRESS questionnaires have been distributed to all NSS members in October 2011 after briefing the objectives of CRESS. • But, only two institutions responded in trying to fill-in the questionnaire. • CSA contacted the focal experts and observed the challenges in filling the questionnaires .

14. Challenges to Collect the Data • The experts were not clear as to how they should extract the data from their institutions. • Reluctance of experts in collecting the data as the task of filling-in the questionnaire required experts’ time and effort,

15. How Did CSA Mitigate the Challenge? • CSA had to come up with incentive scheme with the financial support of P21 which took some time to materialize. • After securing the fund from P21, the CSA organized a half day seminar to solve the problem encountered and to proceed with the pilot exercise as planned; • An attempt was made to discuss in detail on each of the questions found on the ongoing and future project forms.

16. Outcome of the Seminar • The Experts seemed to understand the importance of this exercise and showed their commitment through their active participation in the seminar. • A consensus was also reached to finalize and submit the filled-in questionnaire to the CSA by the end of January. • The experts are motivated by the incentive too.

17. Lessons Learned from the Pilot in Ethiopia • The Challenge of getting the actual amount spent for statistical activities out of the total budget allotted to institutions i.e. the difficulty in identifying the statistical component in a given project be it national resource or FTPs project. • In a Federal System like Ethiopia, local governments also allot budget for some statistical activities where the experts raised scope of the CRESS whether they should include districts of the sectors or not. We decided to restrict ourselves to the resources at Federal Level.

18. Thank you for kind attention