Abstract

Over the last two years the Statistics Division of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNSD) and the United Nations Expert Group on National Quality Assurance Frameworks (EG-NQAF) have worked to develop a “Module for Quality Assurance when using Administrative and Other Data Sources to produce Official Statistics” and the associated “Assessment Checklist”, which were adopted by the UN Statistical Commission (UNSC) at its 56th session in March 2025. The “Module” complements a series of quality guidelines developed over the last few years that are meant to constitute an integrated set of tools to be applied at different levels of implementation, that is at the level of a Statistical Agency or of an individual statistical process or output. The set includes the “UN National Quality Assurance Frameworks Manual for Official Statistics” and the associated “UN NQAF self-assessment checklist”, approved by the UNSC in 2019, as well as “The Roadmap for NQAF development and implementation” endorsed in 2023.
Despite the fact that these manuals and tools have been developed based on a review of country documents and practices, and with the support of country representatives’ active on the EG-NQAF, challenges in the implementation of a Quality Assurance Strategy at national level remain.
To further strengthen the effectiveness and applicability of these instruments, country representatives at the last UN Statistical Commission session recommended: to take into account national contexts when implementing these tools and to refine them based on experiences of countries in their use; to enhance the flexibility in the framework’s implementation, ensuring that countries with varying levels of statistical development can adapt and apply NQAF effectively; to address the integration and joint implementation of quality assurance and the use of the Generic Statistical Business Process Model; to expand technical assistance for developing countries to support resource-efficient implementation strategies and the adoption of the tools by all data producers in the national statistical system.
This session at the World Statistics Congress will allow the presentation and discussion of these different perspectives in the implementation of a Quality Assurance Strategy at national level with the objective to distil key recommendations and lessons learned in establishing a management system instrumental in ensuring high-quality process and products across the national statistical system.
The papers presented at this session will be the first contributions for the preparation of a special issue of the Statistical Journal of the IAOS dedicated to this theme. This WSC session will also be complemented by a call for papers to collect and document country experiences in the implementation of a Quality Assurance Strategy.