In the Construction of an International Agricultural Data Quality Assessment Framework (ADQAF)

The fact that there is still no ADQAF yet at global or the national level until now is not very surprising as the DQAF for the overall official statistics is still under development and not completed yet; the situation itself however is intolerable with the urgency and needs pressed by users for timely and better quality agricultural statistics as reflected in the Global strategy for Agricultural statistics. As specialized area and subset of the overall official statistics, data collection, compilation and dissemination for agricultural statistics are often carried out by Statisticians in the Ministries of Agriculture rather than the National Statistics Offices (NSOs) an ADQAF is supposed to be simpler and easier than the DQAF for the overall official statistics; and this ADQAF should be a pioneer rather than a lagger in the development of the overall DQAF. In this paper, a framework for the ADQAF is proposed based on the principles guiding rules and methodology that have been developed for the overall DQAF and CountrySTAT. The proposed ADQAF will be tested from both the global and national perspectives, especially the previous experience in compiling agricultural metadata in different continents and countries. The field data and metadata collected for agricultural statistics in Uganda is used as a country case study to test out the proposed ADQAF. Such an ADQAF will be valuable and useful to provide a starting point for further discussion and future development in this area. Related issues , problems and difficulties will be discussed.