Caribbean Statistics Day – Message from the Minister with Responsibility for Statistics

“OBSERVANCE OF CARIBBEAN STATISTICS DAY 2019”

St. Vincent and the Grenadines along with our regional colleagues, will on October 15, 2019 celebrate Caribbean Statistics Day (CSD) with a week of activities under the theme “Building the Resilience of the Caribbean Community”. This theme which was also used in 2018 is being repeated because of its continued relevance to the region.

Statistics Day/Week is celebrated around the region each year and internationally every four years. The intent is to raise the profile of statistics in order to create more awareness of its production, dissemination and use, thus promoting a culture of evidence-based decision-making and research among individuals, businesses, governments and academia.

To build the resilience of the Caribbean Community, each country comprising the community has to be resilient itself. Here in St. Vincent and the Grenadines, every effort is being made through training, technical assistance and other capacity building initiatives to ensure that we are positioned to contribute to building resilience nationally and regionally. In so doing, the Statistical Office work very closely with local, regional and international counterparts to provide data and statistics. To achieve this, more coordination and collaboration (as is enshrined in the Census and Statistics Act) is needed, particularly at the local level since data is captured by various agencies external to the Statistical Office. It is therefore the intention of the Statistical Office to embark on developing a national strategy for the development of statistics in the near future where the roles and responsibilities of the various agencies within the statistical system will be clearly defined.

The Statistical Office continue to work very closely with the CARICOM Secretariat, the ECCB and the OECS Commission to improve the coverage, reliability and quality of the traditional areas of statistics and to develop frameworks to measure new and emerging issues. This involves the use of international concepts and definitions and as far as possible, harmonizing them, taking into account the regional perspective. The Population and Housing Census (CARICOM), the Labour Force Survey (OECS/ILO), National Accounts and Balance of Payments (ECCB/ECCU)) are some of the areas in which harmonized instruments are already being used. This augurs well, not just for St Vincent and the Grenadines, but for the region, in that, the data produced can be compared across the different countries.