Pencils to pixels: Pacific statistics ‘smarter, faster’ with SPC–World Bank tech and training

A man wearing a Tonga Statistics Department uniform interviews a survey participant using a computer tablet.

Computer tablets and cloud software are making Pacific statistics more accurate, advanced and cost-effective, with Pacific Community (SPC) support and World Bank software.

SPC, the World Bank and United Nations Statistical Institute for Asia and the Pacific are providing support to 13 Pacific countries and territories in their use of computer-assisted personal interviewing, or CAPI, for censuses and surveys in the Pacific through subregional training held in Nadi, Fiji this week.

The transition from pens, pencils and paper formats to CAPI has been one of the key ways in which national statistics offices have modernised their collection and production of official statistics over the past decade.

Following several years of skills and infrastructure investment—with CAPI first used at scale in the Pacific for Vanuatu’s and Tonga’s 2016 censuses—attention is focusing on the full potential of using software to make surveys smarter.

More than simply swapping clipboards for computer tablets, CAPI combines the strengths of face-to-face interviewing with the agility of technology, explains Ms Maria Musudroka, Manager of Statistics Collections with SPC’s Statistics for Development Division.

Benefits include improved data quality, reduced lag between data collection and analysis, and significant savings in fieldwork and data-processing costs, she says.

“Over the past 15 or so years, the switch to CAPI has transformed the way that many statistics agencies collect and analyse data,” Ms Musudroka explains.

“With CAPI, we not only reduce manual errors and streamline data entry, but can provide real-time feedback to collections staff. This speeds up the whole process and ensures much higher data quality.

“The ability to instantly validate responses in software, and even update scripting and questions remotely, gives us a level of flexibility and accuracy that has not been possible with paper-based methods historically.”

Many places in the Pacific have adopted the software Survey Solutions, developed and offered open-source and free of charge by the World Bank for designing, collecting and managing censuses and surveys. On the fieldwork side, Survey Solutions works with tablets running the Android operating system, replacing the traditional paper booklets.

SPC provides support and training at the national level for the conduct of surveys and censuses, as well as shared-services infrastructure in Survey Solutions, building and hosting surveys for 14 member states.

But high staff turnover and capability gaps in the Pacific mean that this regional training is needed to strengthen existing capacity. A 2023 capacity needs assessment report from SPC shows a skills gap of 65 per cent in data collection and places demand for training in collection applications, including Survey Solutions, as one of the highest priorities for national statistics offices in the Pacific.

“When we first started using CAPI in 2015, the focus was on getting existing question sets into software,” explains Ms Alice Trief, a senior statistician with Vanuatu Bureau of Statistics.

“But the real potential comes from using conditions,” she says, referring to rules created in software that ensure respondents are guided through relevant questions, while irrelevant ones are skipped. The same logic can also check for nonsensical responses when properly designed.

“For Vanuatu’s 2020 census, we recruited nearly 1,000 fieldworkers who receive two weeks of training. Using CAPI, we get much cleaner data, faster, as well as making the fieldwork easier for our temporary staff who are not experts in data collection.

“There are features of Survey Solutions that I’ve never used so this training has been great.”

Key datasets derived from census and survey data—such as population statistics and select microdata—are shared on the SPC-managed Pacific Data Hub, a regional open-data initiative supported by New Zealand’s Government.

Read the dynamic story with photography

For more information on this story, contact Mr Ben Campion, Communications Adviser, Statistics for Development Division, Pacific Community (SPC), [email protected].