By Mohamed Jaward Nyallay
Statistics Sierra Leone (Stats SL) has announced the commencement the Annual Survey of Economic Enterprises (AESE), the second component of the Economic Survey conducted by the statistical agency.
The exercise, which started last week and is expected to be concluded by the end of December, will cover more than 7000 business enterprises across the country, from small, to medium to multinational corporations.
Stats SL announced the rationale of the survey at a press conference at its headquarters on Monday, where officials said enumerators have been specially trained to gather information on the businesses using computed technique.
Among many other things, the survey will help establish the industry growth rate, service growth rate, GDP contributing factors and development expenditure patterns.
Statistician General, Professor Osman Sankoh said: “If you are a government, you will now have data to really plan.”
World Bank Technical Adviser on Statics, Liz Foster said the survey would help in improving on the business environment by equipping the businesspersons with information to grow their businesses.
“Development partners will also be able to design programmes to support small and medium scale enterprises in the country,” said Foster.
Data on this survey, will be shared with government for economic development purposes.
But a contentious issue is whether businesses will be open to providing the statistics body the information they need. Businesses might be scared to handover information on their businesses in fear that other government agencies like the National Revenue Authority (NRA) would get the information.
But Foster, whose organization is responsible to provide technical assistance to this survey, said they were not under any obligation to share the data with NRA.
“Our work is to collect accurate data. The government also agreed with us on this. We will only share aggregates and averages and not any particular information on businesses,” she said.
Stats SL used the press conference to also announce plans for the year ahead. Prof. Sankoh said the institution is hoping to get a $26 million grant from the World Bank to be used for the refurbishment and expansion of the agency’s headquarters and invest into annual activities like surveys.
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