Discussing future collaborative works

ASA members Abera Wouhib of the National Institutes of Health, Solomon Harrar of the University of Kentucky, and Malick Mbodj of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration organized a weeklong visit to Ethiopia March 16–20 that included a conference, meetings, and seminars.

JU conference participants

The international conference in applied statistics took place in Jimma per an invitation by Jimma University. With the theme “Theory to Practice,” it aimed to foster the exchange of ideas among statisticians at various stages in their careers at educational, government, and private institutions throughout Ethiopia. Wouhib and Harrar gave invited talks. Additional invited talks were given by Kofi Adragni, Thomas Mathew, Nagaraj Neerchal, April Albertine, Kalimuthu Krishnamoorthy, Arne Bathke, Jin Xu, and Frank Konietschke.

Jimma University hosted the conference in view of its status as one of the pioneering universities in East Africa to run graduate programs in applied statistics. Currently, the university offers a master’s program in biostatistics and will soon launch a PhD program in various fields of statistics.

On March 19 and 20, some of the conference participants were invited to the Central Statistical Agency (CSA) in Addis Ababa for informal discussions with agency directorates, the director general, and the deputy director. They spoke about improving statistical inferences based on small sample sizes and addressing some of the technological and computational issues at CSA. The research talk “Testing non-inferiority and equivalence for proportion ratio under matched pair design with two binary endpoints” was presented by Xu Jin.

CSA is the primary statistical agency in Ethiopia, conducting regular and ad hoc sample surveys, executing a decennial population census, and providing population projections. The visiting team also shared their ideas about producing national statistical data and showed their willingness to help CSA with its future capacity-building efforts. Additionally, Wouhib and Mbodj gave talks about adjusting sample survey weights and the application of R in sample surveys. These talks were attended by agency experts at all levels.