The rapidly changing situation and significant economic, social and political challenges that the country is experiencing calls for informed responses, guided by valid, relevant evidence. Access to shared sources of evidence is important to base responses on conditions within communities. Ensuring access to data is also important to inform agendas for research that supports human and social development in Zimbabwe.
To inform research on and programmes aimed at supporting human development, an inventory was carried out of sources and types of evidence on different dimensions of human development at national and sub-national levels. This mapping of sources of evidence seeks to give a holistic picture of the information gathered by government departments, parastatals, non-governmental organizations and international agencies.
The report presents the inventory of routine, periodic data from surveys, facility reports or surveillance findings focused on seven areas of identified importance to human development, ie health, education, income and expenditure, employment, food security, production, particularly agricultural production and household assets. It covers publicly available evidence collected from census, household surveys, sample surveys, sentinel site surveys, routine information systems and qualitative assessments. The report presents information for the indicators on the
? The institutional source ? The specific indicators collected within the area ? The scope (national, provincial, district), type of data collection
and level of disaggregation ? The periodicity and dates of recent rounds of data collection ? Information on where to obtain the reports and the databases if
relevant It provides comment on the data availability and quality as noted in the reports.
The bulk of statistical information collected throughout the public service is centralized and published by the Central Statistical Office. Recently, the Central Statistical Office has launched a statistical database called ZIMDAT, which is now available on CD-ROM. This database contains information (from all sector implementing ministries), which is intended to measure progress towards the attainment of the millennium goals spelt out in Zimbabwe’s development context.
While the inventory indicates a number of sources of potentially good evidence on key areas of human development, including from large household surveys, it also identifies a number of shortfalls:
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? There is limited routine evidence that is both available and current. Many household surveys were done in 2006 or before, and reports of more recent surveys are not all publicly available due in part to bottlenecks with publication or limited dissemination.
? There are gaps in some areas of evidence, but more importantly in the coverage of private sector services, informal sector income, economic activities and employment and the cross border economic, migration and income flows that are now more common.
? Facility data is less valid than household surveys, but has the advantage of being more frequent and current. It is however affected by the fall out from services and by breakdowns in reporting, leading to potential areas of bias.
? Many sources of evidence can only be analysed to provincial level, which weakens the use of these sources for processes such as allocation of public resources and budgets. The periodic poverty surveys can be analysed to district level, and it is suggested that given the significant changes since the last survey in 2003, a further round would provide vital evidence for planning.
? The production of ZIMDAT is a useful measure to make statistical evidence available, but there is relatively little promotion of the availability of the electronic databases and reports and the sometimes long delays in making reports publicly available also weakens their use in policy dialogue.
The more current data, such as the reports from facilities on notifiable diseases, is potentially important information, but limited by the fallout from services, personnel shortfalls and reporting bottlenecks. Moving from paper to electronic reporting for both household and facility reports would facilitate both the timing, spread and uptake of this information, if the personnel issues are addressed. However facility data may still present an inaccurate picture where there are costs, geographical and quality barriers to people using the facilities.
How widely are these data sources used in social and policy dialogue on conditions, budget debates, in media dissemination and in assessing social needs? This is not clear and a comparison against media reports or parliamentary hansards would for example give some indication of how the evidence is used by media and parliamentarians respectively. For all the routine data sources listed, it would seem to be a significant loss to invest in the data collection and analysis, and not make the further, probably smaller but different investment to ensure dissemination, outreach and uptake of the evidence.
The inventory is by no means exhaustive and this report is being circulated as a means of getting feedback on sources that have relevance but have not yet been included. Feedback is thus invited on the report to admin@tarsc.org both as comment on the information presented and as feedback on any data sources that still need to be included.