Dakar, Senegal, 20 December 2016 (IDEP) - The African Institute for Economic Development and Planning (IDEP) recently hosted 16 statisticians from the national statistical offices of eight Francophone countries from West, Central and Eastern Africa in a workshop meant to hone their skills in population projections.
The regional workshop, which ran from November 28 to December 2, 2016, was organized by the Population Division of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN/DESA) in partnership with ECA’s African Centre for Statistics (ACS) and IDEP.
The main objective of the workshop was to introduce participants to projection methods and tools. The training was a continuation of previous training on population estimations that was organized by the same partners in Dakar in September 2016.
IDEP Director, Ms. Karima Bounemra Ben Soltane, in her remarks to participants at the beginning of the workshop, reiterated the importance of the continuous training for Africa’s civil servants in issues to deal with the population for planning purposes.
“One of the key challenges for African countries today is to manage successfully their demographic transition and design socio-economic policies that will provide their sizeable young population with the means to fully contribute to economic growth and benefit from it” said Ms. Ben Soltane.
She added that since African countries were at different levels of the demographic transition, the formulation of policy actions that are adapted to each country’s specificities would ultimately depend on national capacities to make population projections, based on accurate data.
A representative of the trainees expressed participants’ satisfaction with the outcome of the training, adding they felt they were now in a better position to guide decision-making in their respective countries in the formulation of evidence-based policies.
A monthly development seminar on youth employment and the demographic dividend was also organized by IDEP in the framework of the same workshop.
The seminar was attended by representatives of the Senegalese government, international institutions and members the diplomatic corps, academia and civil society organizations. The monthly development seminar gave participants the opportunity to discuss practical population projection cases from the continent and how they could be used to inform the development of policies that can lead to the improvement of ordinary people’s lives in terms of service delivery and related issues.
Issued by:
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Economic Commission for Africa
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