- September 5, 2024
- Posted by: admin
- Category: Headline
The increasing importance of foreign private capital (FPC) flows and the need to understand their impact highlights the compelling need for reliable, accurate and consistent statistics in line with international standards. Specifically, for the Balance of Payments (BOP) and International Investment Position (IIP), information on FPC flows is an essential data source for the primary income and financial accounts. For countries to effectively collect FPC data, it is recommended that they adopt survey-based collection systems as an alternative to obtaining the data through the International Transactions Reporting System (ITRS).
To contribute to this process, MEFMI completed all the pending tasks on Version IV of the PCMS in September 2023. The tasks included data migration, addressing all comments from the technical review of the system, completion of the dashboard module, branding and visual design, testing of the entire system, as well as documenting of system . Having completed the relevant tasks, MEFMI is now rolling out the system to all the user countries and is set to do the same to the non-user countries who may be interested in using the system.
It is on this basis that the Zanzibar FPC team requested MEFMI to conduct a technical assistance mission on the use of the new MEFMI PCMS to process data for their 2023 foreign investment survey from 22 April – 3 May 2024. The objective of the mission was to facilitate the survey data capture and reporting, review the information in the survey questionnaires to ensure consistency with the financial statements, interrogate the captured data in the system to establish possible gaps, as well as reconcile the survey output of the financial flows and positions to ensure consistency between the data to be compiled into the BOP and IIP, respectively.
The mission started with a courtesy call and a brief meeting with Dr. Kamilus Kombe, the Branch Director, Bank of Tanzania Zanzibar Sub Head office. The Director expressed appreciation to MEFMI for the support Zanzibar has received on capacity building in various fields, including monitoring and analysis of foreign private capital. He was of the view that the PCMS Version IV will be instrumental in enhancing data capture accuracy and therefore minimize errors. The Director indicated that he expected that the information that would be collected would be posted and thoroughly cleaned during the mission to make it ready for analysis and report writing.
A total of 13 officials participated in the mission comprising 7 males (or 54 percent of the total) and 6 females (or 46 percent of the total). The team was comprised of members from the Office of Chief Government Statistician (OCGS), Zanzibar Investment Promotion Authority (ZIPA) and Bank of Tanzania Zanzibar Sub Head Office. The mission was facilitated by three (3) resource persons, Mr. Senei Molapo, a MEFMI Graduate Fellow and MEFMI Programme Manager, Mr. Philip Mboya, a MEFMI Graduate Fellow in FPC, Ms. Ms Oratile Mmualefe. MEFMI Graduate Fellow in Data Quality as well as Mr. Dennis Mollel, a System Developer and Back-end Technical Expert.