A lot of modern equipment to the value of about $ 260,000 was donated to the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) to support it in the process of usual resident population calculation and estimation of international and internal migration at the local level. The donation was made within the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) project “Improving the institutional capacity of the National Bureau of Statistics”, funded by Switzerland and co-financed by UNFPA, IPN reports.
The donated equipment - 215 tablets, 21 state-of-the-art computers and laptops, 5 printers and network equipment - distributed to the NBS departments involved in data collection, population and migration calculation, census, administrative and georeferenced data collection. The equipment will strengthen the process of data collection, processing of big data, will increase the analysis capacity of the NBS and will allow the use of modern statistical methods such as housing georeferencing, computer-assisted data collection and processing and others.
Nigina Abaszada, UNFPA Resident Representative in the Republic of Moldova, said that modern equipment is an important element in the process of improving the NBS's capacity to collect and process population and migration data. “UNFPA is the core partner of the National Bureau of Statistics in this area and will continue to provide support for the production of quality population data to better respond to demographic changes in the country,” stated Nigina Abaszada.
Caroline Tissot, the director of the Swiss Cooperation Office, stressed that statistics are essential for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals assumed by the Republic of Moldova. Qualitative and timely data also means objective information and policies tailored to the development needs of the community.
For his part, Oleg Cara, NBS director general, thanked for the donated equipment, saying the National Bureau of Statistics has taken a major step in digitizing the data collection process, increasing the analysis capacity of the information collected by using modern statistical methods.
In addition to the technical capacity of the NBS, the project supported by UNFPA and Switzerland also provides expertise in the production of territorial and residential disaggregation to estimate the number of people with usual residence by age and sex, using data on domestic and international migration from administrative sources at the disaggregated level of administrative-territorial units.
The project “Improving the institutional capacity of the National Bureau of Statistics” aims to increase the capacity of the NBS to achieve the 17 Objective of the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda, in particular on strengthening statistical capacity and ensuring the availability of high quality disaggregated data.