With UN help…
– Finance Minister Singh
MINISTER of Finance, Dr. Ashni Singh emphasised yesterday that statistics are important, because they inform development polices, show the progress of their implementation and inform Guyana’s development partners, expressly multilateral development agencies.
He was speaking at the opening of an eight-day workshop at Regency Suites in Hadfield Street, Stabroek, Georgetown, on the heels of the first World Statistics Day observance and his announcement that Guyana’s National Population Census will be done in 2012.
The focus of the workshop is on training in the use of the Statistical Programme Census Survey Processing System (CSPro) and involves 16 stakeholders from eight Government ministries and the Bureau of Statistics.
The CSPro software was developed by the United States (U.S.) and is widely utilised in the Caribbean region to process survey data and the exercise that begun yesterday resulted from collaboration among the Bureau of Statistics, United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (UNECLAC) and United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA).
Minister Singh said the role of statistics is indispensable, expressly considering its impact on evidence based policy making.
He said Guyana has progressed in strengthening its statistical capacity and updating national statistical databases and cited the recent rebasing of the National Accounts Framework, one of several initiatives which generate results that interest Guyanese citizens as well as economic entities.
Singh maintained that the value of  statistics is most evident in the need to capture the evolution of Guyana’s economy.

DYNAMISM

He explained that statistical data highlight the sectors, showing dynamism, those sectors that show growth, expressly the services and agriculture sectors, which have made significant strides in the diversification of activities.
Singh said the use of CSPro is an addition to the Information Communication Technology (ICT) tools being used by the Administration to improve efficiency in executing its functions.
He observed that Guyana is taking steps to ensure that development continues along a modern paradigm and said, apart from the Bureau of Statistics, several Government Ministries have their own statistics units, in particular the Ministries of Health, Education and Home Affairs.
Singh noted that the decentralisation of statistical capacity goes a long way towards informing strategies to move the individual sectors forward and, by extension, the country as a whole.
“There is a national comprehensive effort to improve statistical capacity and it is an effort that is yielding results already…the progress has been real,” he reported.
Coordinator of the Statistical Unit at UNECLAC, Mr. Sylvan Roberts commended Guyana’s commitment to improving its statistical capacity and noted that in this process, partnerships are quintessential.
However, he said his agency, unlike its UN sister agencies, does not fund but can provide support once it is requested.
Roberts said, across the Caribbean region, the rapidity in processing statistical data, as well as its analysis, has been a persisting challenge but this will, hopefully, be addressed with the introduction of the CSPro technology.
UNECLAC Social and Development Unit Coordinator, Ms. Sheila Stuart informed that this is just the first one in a series of national workshops, which will further increase Guyana’s capacity.

CHALLENGES

She said other challenges plaguing territories in the Caribbean include access to quality statistical data to monitor initiatives, such as the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and the systematic collection and processing of data.
However, Stuart recognised that Guyana is better off than some of its Caribbean counterparts in that several reports, particularly relating to the MDGs, are available.
Still, she noted that there is much work to be done in areas like gender and other social issues.
Stuart explained that the efforts being made by UNECLAC to support countries like Guyana are largely collaborative between UN sister agencies, the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), University of the West Indies (UWI) and the Caribbean Development Bank (CDB).
She said the quest is to build human resource capacity for collection and analysis of data so that countries’ status on social, economic and environmental issues can be monitored, evaluated and improved.
In the end, Stuart said governments will be able to assess the progress of development initiatives.
ECLAC, headquartered in Santiago, Chile, is one of the five regional UN commissions. It was founded with the purpose of contributing to the economic development of Latin America, coordinating actions directed towards that goal and reinforcing economic ties among countries of the world. The promotion of the region’s social development was included, later, among its primary objectives.