CARICOM Secretary-General Edwin Carrington is advocating that Caribbean governments resolve to strengthen the capacity of their central statistical offices and the statistics departments of other ministries and agencies.
The region observed the second Caribbean Statistics Day Friday and will observe World Statistics Day today.
In a message to mark the occasion, Secretary-General Carrington said that statistics were at “the very heart of everything we do,” from deriving data on issues pertaining to population, to the standard of living and the extent of poverty. Therefore, he stated, “it is critical” that governments play a “major role” in strengthening the capacity of their national statistical frameworks. The CARICOM Secretariat, with the support of the European Union, has planned a variety of activities to mark the occasion including seminars on selected social sectors and on issues pertaining to statistics, demonstrations of the Regional Statistics Online Facilities, exhibition and visual arts presentations, and slogan and jingle competitions involving children and youth from primary and secondary schools.
Carrington said that the observance of Caribbean Statistics Day and World Statistics Day under the theme ‘Celebrating the Many Achievements of Official Statistics’ provided “a very valuable opportunity to recognize the crucial role of statistics in laying the foundation for arriving at decisions based on facts, rather than on conjecture.”
And the activities to mark these observances, he added, would not only serve to raise the profile of statistics in the Community, but also to emphasise the need to encourage decision-makers, re-searchers, and other stakeholders to make use of statistics.
