BOLIVIA / USA – Bolivia will upgrade its statistical system to increase the use of official statistics in public and private decision-making through a $100 million loan from the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB).
The program will fund measures to improve the quality of official statistical information in terms of relevance, timeliness, reliability, and accessibility, and to strengthen the National Statistics Institute (INE) both technically and institutionally.
The program will provide technical and financial support for a new round of censuses, including the Population and Housing Census, Agricultural Census, and Economic Establishments Census, following international standards and best practices. To this end, the program will promote innovation through state-of-the-art technologies such as satellite images, digital cartography, digital instruments for information capture, and modern and secure technological instruments for information processing and dissemination.
The initiative will also help consolidate an integrated system of household surveys that includes instruments with a gender perspective, such as the Comprehensive Survey on the Situation of Women and the Time Use Survey, along with operations such as the Household Budget Survey and Victimization and Citizen Security Survey, among others.
In addition, the program will finance the technical and institutional strengthening of the INE. The goal is for the information it generates through censuses, surveys, and administrative records to be of high quality and that it includes innovations in all phases of the production process of official statistics, particularly data collection and interaction with surveyed individuals. In this context, the IDB loan will help fund training, technical assistance, systems, equipment, and processing and dissemination of statistical data, among other activities.
The central government and its decentralized units will benefit from this program by counting on quality, reliable, timely, and relevant information to develop public policies, plans, and socioeconomic projects, and to measure the progress of these initiatives and actions.
In particular, INE will benefit from having an updated database on the entire population, living and housing conditions, and the business and agricultural sectors. It will also have modern tools for data capture, processing, and dissemination, including trained personnel.
Civil society will also benefit from having updated and disaggregated census information that will help formulate plans, investment projections, supply of goods and services, and conducting scientific and academic studies and research.
This operation is in line with Vision 2025, created by the IDB as a roadmap to achieve recovery and inclusive growth in Latin America and the Caribbean in the areas of digital economy, gender and inclusion, and climate change.
The IDB’s $100 million loan has a 20-year maturity, a 10-year grace period, an interest rate based on SOFR, and $40 million in counterpart funds for the Population and Housing Census from FONPLATA – Development Bank.
