Gradual Modernisation of Statistics Sector
The General Statistics Office (GSO) under the Ministry of Planning and Investment recently organised a meeting to review the GSO Modernisation Project funded by the World Bank (WB). The investment capital of the project was US$18 million and the counterpart capital was VND7.5 billion. The project aimed to enhance the quality, transparency and timeliness of important social and economic data in national censuses.
Mr Nguyen Van Lieu, GSO Deputy Director and Project Leader, said, this is a component sub-project of the WB-funded US$90 million Information Technology and Communication Development Project. The GSO Modernisation Project was officially executed from October 2006 to the end of December 2013. Up to the present time, all the items of the project have been completed and brought into use to collect, process accurate, reliable data at GSO.
GSO said the perfection and construction of information technology infrastructure system support professional works of GSO staffs. According to initial designs, the subproject has three objectives: Enhancing the quality, transparency and timeliness of social and economic data and information, poverty situation to serve State agencies, research bodies and users for policymaking and decision-making; modernising the system to catch up with the advanced level in the region; and improving the data system, raising the capability of analysing and disseminating statistical information for various information users.
The GSO Modernisation Project also built core application software system used for most data collecting and processing processes. The newly equipped software system not only allows GSO to improve the efficiency of collecting and processing statistical data but also gradually changes the way GSO works with data. This objective was achieved by carrying out three bid packages, namely GSO6.1b - Solutions to statistical data collection and processing based on scanning and image recognition technology; GSO5.2 - Upgrading of IT infrastructure and development of system for statistical information collection (SSIC), and GSO5.2a - Statistical information system and statistical information portal. Particularly, GSO6.1b Package, completed in 2009, provided a modern tool for GSO to collect data in a modern, advanced way. This package was applied by GSO to the population and housing census in 2009 and agriculture and fisheries census in 2011. With this technical improvement, the time for processing data was shortened to 40 percent compared to the conventional way used earlier.
After seven years of implementation, according to the WB, the project has brought tremendous political, economic and social benefits to Vietnam. However, the WB also recommended Vietnam’s statistics officials enhance capacity, improve and update knowledge of information technology to gradually master advanced technical and scientific means.
Anh Phuong
Vietnamese
