National Statistical Offices (NSOs) have the mandate to collect, analyze, and disseminate official statistics for monitoring the development of socio-economic indicators, which help policymakers make better decisions. NSOs must address several issues to adopt innovative methods of data integration that combine information from different data sources (household surveys, population censuses, administrative records, satellite imagery, and social media) to produce relevant information for vulnerable populations allocated all along the countries.
The growing need for timely statistics can be adequately fulfilled by innovative procedures of record linkage, which allows achieving enhanced accuracy to identify and merge records that refer to the same entity across different datasets for broader coverage. Also, by integrating data from diverse sources, NSOs can achieve broader coverage of the population or target areas of interest using Area Estimation Models that provide reliable statistics where traditional survey methods fail. Many countries have begun to use these techniques to provide official statistics on poverty, labor market indicators, among others. The UN Regional Commissions and the Inter-Secretariat Working Group on Household Surveys have established capacity-building projects to support countries in establishing estimating systems that allow for this kind of innovative approach.
In this session, we showcase some real experiences of NSOs adopting a culture of data integration for several indicators. Based on these experiences, we discuss the challenges ahead to build capacities in NSOs regarding data integration and the monitoring of Sustainable Development Goals.