Nigeria has become the largest economy in the first wave of countries in Sub-Saharan Africa to implement the recommendations of the Enhanced General Data Dissemination System (e-GDDS).
This follows the visit of the International Monetary Fund (IMF)’s Statistics Department to Abuja from February 15-19, 2016 to assist the authorities with the implementation e-GDDS endorsed by the Executive Board in May 2015.
The e-GDDS was established by the IMF’s Executive Board in May 2015 to support improved data transparency, encourage statistical development, and help create synergies between data dissemination and surveillance. It superseded the GDDS, which was established in 1997.
Following this development, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) will have the National Summary Data Page (NSDP) posted to its website. This page utilizes the Open Data Platform installed with the support of the African Development Bank and will serve as a one-stop publication vehicle for essential macroeconomic data.
Nigeria’s progress in achieving this important milestone in its quest for better statistics have encouraged stakeholders.
By publishing essential macroeconomic data through the new NSDP, national policy makers, domestic and international stakeholders, including investors and rating agencies will have easy access to information that the IMF’s Executive Board has identified as critical for monitoring economic conditions and policies.
Users will now have simultaneous access to timely data and will bring greater data transparency because the information is easily accessible in both human and machine-readable formats, and based on an Advance Release Calendar.
Through the NSDP, users will have full access to information about Nigeria’s e-GDDS data categories will be granted April 29, 2016.