Africa-Press – Botswana. The Ministry of Youth, Gender, Sports and Culture (MYSC) continues to increase stakeholder participation, appreciation and informed utilisation of statistics through building vibrant and durable partnerships across ministries.
The sports and recreation chief programmes officer in the ministry, Mr Lincoln Goitsemang, said this during a workshop on data collection tools assessment in Gaborone on Wednesday.
Mr Goitsemang said they had since engaged departments and agencies, state owned enterprises, the business community and other stakeholders in the National Statistical Systems (NSS) to capture data.
The ministry, he said, had found the need to assess data collection tools in the sport and recreation ecosystem as well as developing a compendium of statistical concepts and definitions.
Mr Goitsemang said this would provide a facilitation mechanism that would factor in harmonisation, comparability of data and statistics as well as underpinning the use of standard statistical concepts and definitions.
He said the contribution of sport and recreation to the country’s economy and the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) could not be over emphasised.
Mr Goitsemang said the contribution of the non-mining sector to the economy led by sport had been phenomenal in the past two decades and needed to be packaged and reported accordingly, hence the workshop.
He further indicated that as the agency coordinating the development and maintenance of NSS, Statistics Botswana had been developing processes to capture the contribution adequately and efficiently.
Mr Goitsemang noted that the intention of the workshop was to come up with complete documentation on data collection tools, coherent methodologies as well as agreed baselines, targets and indicators that would assist the sporting fraternity and the country with validated, quantifiable, reliable data that would demonstrate and push sport as a business.
He said Statistics Botswana would continue to provide guidance and the technical know-how to monitor data collection and analysis from the developed tools as well as updating the compendium of concepts and definitions from time to time.
He said the three days workshop would also provide an opportunity to reflect on what they had achieved on outcomes of the assessment of data tools and what still needed to be done.
The ministry, he said, had always been participating in meaningful and strategic data assessment initiatives, which provided checks and balances.
He further added that the data collection assessment for arts and culture had been accomplished, whereas the youth and gender data collection tools assessments had been scheduled before the end of the financial year.
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