Press Release No. 17/451

Senegal Subscribes to the IMF’s Special Data Dissemination Standard

November 20, 2017

On November 20, 2017, Senegal subscribed to the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) Special Data Dissemination Standard (SDDS), becoming the fourth country in Sub-Saharan African to reach this goal. It is also the very first country to graduate from the enhanced General Data Dissemination System (e-GDDS), under which Senegal launched a National Summary Data Page — a one-stop online data publication portal—laying the foundation for moving to the next level of IMF data standards, the SDDS. In this process, Senegal has benefitted from support by the Department for International Development (DFID) Enhanced Data Dissemination Initiative, financed by the government of the United Kingdom, and by funding from the African Development Bank to build and maintain the open data platform that allows machine-to-machine data transmission.

“Senegal’s subscription to the SDDS represents a major step forward for official statistics in the country and for those who use these data,” said Mr. Louis Marc Ducharme, Director of the IMF’s Statistics Department. “The subscription to the standards underscores Senegal’s strong commitment to transparency, as well as the adoption of internationally accepted best practices in statistics,” he added. Director Ducharme is in Dakar for the official announcement of Senegal’s subscription to SDDS.

The SDDS, established by the IMF in March 1996, is intended to guide members in the provision of economic and financial data to the public. Subscription to the SDDS enhances the availability of timely statistics according to an advance release calendar, thereby contributing to sound macroeconomic policies and the proper functioning of financial markets. Although voluntary, a subscribing member commits to observe the standard and to provide information (metadata) to the IMF about its data dissemination practices. This information is made publicly available on the IMF's Dissemination Standards Bulletin Board (DSBB).

The DSBB now provides comprehensive documentation in English on the statistical practices of Senegal for SDDS data categories, hyperlinked to country data included in the National Summary Data Page, maintained by the Senegal’s Agence Nationale de la Statistique et de la Démographie (ANSD). Senegal’s SDDS information is available at http://dsbb.imf.org/Pages/SDDS/CountryList.aspx.