In collaboration with the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA), the ECOWAS Commission has set a machinery in motion for an on-line StatBase Platform.

The platform which can facilitate the management and dissemination of statistical data was set up after a five-Day training workshop which ended in Abuja, Nigeria on the 11th of August 2017. The activity is part of UNECA’s technical assistance programme for ECOWAS.

Through this, the ECOWAS Directorate of Research and Statistics (DRS) is maximizing the benefits linked to the implementation of the platform by involving and extending the platform project to all the ECOWAS Commission’s partners, the Directorates of Community Computer Center, Trade as well as Communication to make for a better management of their needs.

According to the Report of the training workshop, participants dealt with issues that included the type of dynamic data to be streamed on the portal, guided pages, explanatory data fields, data query functions, appropriate indicators, etc.

Following the training, preparatory work for the creation of the desired portal had been done which also contains an expandable template for new and relevant trade topics or domains while the template for the DRS documents, reports and publications (now completed) can be fully accessed and explored.

But there will be finalization workshops to review and adopt the structure, design and formatting of publications in addition to capacity-building and exchange of skills transfers with the regional structures.

This will also involve reviews of the codification and implementation of Statistics Indicators to be loaded to the Platform, the design and the general structure of the Portal which would reflect ECOWAS and DRS’ mandate as well as a loading of the macro-economic reports and publications, among others.

The hosting of the working Portal is already transferred to the Community Computer Centre, the final hosting will be done when DRS decides to launch the Portal at the completion of Data loading into the Portal.

However, the work plan in this regard, stipulates that the completed work should be reviewed by the Community Computer Centre in Collaboration with the DRS before the final hosting will take place.

As with the final hosting, a finalization training is to be carried out. The full implementation of the StatBase Portal is expected to be in two phases with each phase containing a series of activities to be carried out under the guidance of resource persons.

They are meant to finalize a set of information that the DRS could make available to the Community and to all users while also putting in place a knowledge transfer strategy for the appropriation of the maintenance and the related modalities.

In view of this progress, the DRS plans to continue working on the Portal implementation with follow up activities heading towards the end of November 2017.