By Tong Akok Anei Mawien
Many of you will see or think of it as a lack of professionalism, but it’s a reality that shapes our way of making decisions, a reality that improves our mode of production to fit our market in a way that we should not underproduce or overproduce. It’s a reality that gives us chances to predict our future and make accurate decisions before reaching that time.
In statistics, the decision revolves around the data you have; it revolves around statistical procedures. With statistics, the decision is not known until it is driven by data through these In statistical procedures, for example, when inventing any machine, if its expected error is higher than its expected benefits, then the preceding of the invention is withheld and sought to reduce the error first; otherwise, if the data you have indicates people in South Sudan need food and good medication and you give them clothes and buy them cars, you have made a wrong decision based on accurate data, and therefore statistics is the wheel and the direction of the decision.
That is why statistics plays a key role in the field of research, and in every field, it facilitates the way we make decisions, and hence our decisions have a beneficial outcome. Most developed and developing countries rely on statistical expertise to facilitate their daily decisions in every sector; they conduct market surveys, consumer behavior, opinion polls on certain policies, the impact of our current behavior toward tomorrow, and many more data generation studies.
Not unlike South Sudan, many of our institutions are operating without a statistics department or an empowered statistics department. You get a statistics department that is not empowered in many of our institutions. This is the time to empower our statistical institutions or departments and give them a leading role in decision-making, and it’s a time to embark on research before any decisions.
The author is an applied statistics master’s student at the University of Juba. He can be reached via tongakok7170@gmail.com/tongakok47@gmail.com Contact: 0929300008/0988011119