The Comprehensive Africa Agricultural Development Program (CAADP) is an African
owned initiative to improve economic growth through agriculture-led development. Sierra
Leone is to the forefront of this initiative being one of the first sub-Saharan countries to
receive funding for its National Sustainable Agricultural Development Plan (NSADP),
through the Global Agriculture & Food Security Program (GAFSP). The Government and its
partners have a number of rural development programmes underway to improve agricultural
productivity and understanding which of these interventions are proving to be most effective
needs reliable and credible data. At present, Sierra Leone’s agricultural and rural
development statistics are somewhat limited e.g. over the last three years both rice
production and imports seem to have increased. While this does not necessarily indicate that
the figures themselves are flawed, it exposes the lack of detailed information at the
Government’s disposal to explain these trends.
This paper will focus on Sierra Leone to review arrangements for the collection of
agricultural and rural statistics to meet policy development, monitoring and evaluation,
internal and external requirements. The paper will identify the providers, the key sources of
information, the strengths and weaknesses of the methodologies used and the information
provided. It will look at practises to reconcile results from different data collection initiatives
and to improve collaboration. The paper will conclude with proposals, reflecting the new
Global Strategy for Agriculture and Rural Statistics, for how the system could be better
organised and to identify ways to improve collaboration to make the overall process more
efficient and effective; while this will reflect the Sierra Leone context it is also likely to have
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more general appeal as data reconciliation, collaboration and institutional co-operation are
issues across many sub-Saharan Africa countries.