Finance Minister Winston Jordan on Monday emphasised the need for up to date information to both guide the country’s efforts to meet its development goals and ensure accountability in all sectors for the delivery of services to citizens.
Giving the keynote address at a High Level Workshop at the Arthur Chung Conference Centre, at Liliendaal, to aid the preparation of Guyana’s Voluntary National Review (VNR) of the progress made in implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) set by the United Nations General Assembly in 2015, Jordan noted ongoing efforts to rebase the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and warned of a “misleading picture” of the national position without the correct data.
“At the national level, we identify the goals and objectives and indicators just as we do at the global level. In the former case, they are the national programme performance indicators and, in the latter case, they are the sustainable development goals and the relevant indicators, consistent with our national development priorities,” he noted.
“We would be doing lip service to these commitments, if we did not take the necessary actions to ensure that we are collecting and analysing the necessary data. Too much is at stake if there is no measurement. The survival of our country and the development of our planet are at stake. Thus, to wander in a fog of ignorance is simply not an option,” he added.
Jordan said programme and agency indicators are extremely important as they allow for measurement of progress towards achieving a particular target or goal, determine value for the money spent and help to identify weaknesses and where additional or dedicated support is required. “This is not just to help you to perform better, but to ensure and validate that your agency is delivering its mandated services, to its target population, in the most effective manner,” he said, while citing the data that is reported on maternal mortality as an example. He said the information is absolutely critical to ensuring that we address the needs of mothers, so that, one day, no mother will ever be lost during child-birth. “The data on this indicator, when disaggregated, will allow us to deliver targeted interventions to the most distressed regions, and will also allow us to remedy deficiencies in our systems and institutions. Maintaining strong data systems will enable us to measure our progress towards the achievement of planned results and reporting on them, at the national and international level,” he further said.
It is against this background that Jordan explained that he had made the improvement of national data systems one of his “core priorities.” He further observed that it is an important development, especially at this current time, “as we enter the ‘silly season,’ more familiarly known as the Elections period, when all kinds of questionable data and ‘facts’ and unsupported statements are spewed by politicians.”
He counted among the ministry successes the support given to the Bureau of Statistics in getting its own headquarters to house its core divisions, and improving staff capacity, even as international help is being sought to strengthen data collection systems.
GDP
He added that personnel from the Caribbean Technical Assistance Center (CARTAC) are supporting Guyana’s efforts to rebase the GDP, in light of the country’s evolving production profile. “Data gathering across all segments of the private sector producing goods or services is critical to the success and accuracy of this exercise. Several of the indicators within the national and SDG framework are expressed as a percentage of GDP or per capita GDP. If our GDP is understated, then our ratios would be incorrect and give a misleading picture of the national position,” he pointed out.
Jordan also said information from the national census, Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys, labour force surveys, and the upcoming agriculture census, among other things, all provide key demographic data and other details that permit assessments of levels of inequality, poverty reduction, and other key socio-economic indicators.
He pledged that just as the country reported on the progress made in its commitments to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), it would do the same for the relevant targets of the SDGs. “This time, however, we must aim to be more fulsome in our work and recognise that the national performance is what will drive sustainable development in our country. So I would expect that the level of energy and dedication that we put in completing this progress report would be multiplied across each of our ten regions, to ensure that sustainable development is indeed taking place in all across the country,” he added.
According to Jordan, in his over four decades of working, most of which has been in government, he observed that the approaches adopted to achieve the national development priorities of the country have, in many instances, suffered from several gaps of evidence-based decision-making. “Proposals are made for capital investments without thought about cost of maintenance; projects are proposed for implementation without the benefit of feasibility studies; people are trained for job readiness and then money is requested to train more without understanding if those trained previously were actually in jobs,” he noted.
Jordan said reforms should not be undertaken without diagnosing what is causing the problems but noted that in order to do so data must be gathered and analysed. “And the analysis that is required must be based on facts and evidence, not mere conjecture, opinions, feelings and beliefs. And facts are supported by evidence, which is often based on data,” he added.
Once the data has been analysed, Jordan said, it is the practical work on the ground to change lives across every sector working collaboratively that will ensure sustainability of the country’s development gains. In this regard, he said the very near future brings a new source of revenue but noted that it is not a finite source and, therefore, there is duty to ensure that the non-petroleum sectors of the country are diversified.
SDGs incorporated into sector plans
Jordan added that committing to a VNR is committing to more than just gathering data as the analysis of the data and the policy and programmatic discussions must occur to inform improved strategic approaches to achieve the timelines that have been agreed.
He also assured that the Finance Ministry would continue to spearhead the coordination of national performance assessments, as it did for the MDGs in the past, and for the SDGs going forward. “We will continue to provide training and capacity building to ensure a ‘whole of government’ capability is developed,” he said.
Jordan noted that since 2016, the ministry has encouraged Budget Agencies to begin incorporating the SDGS within their sectoral strategic plans and programmes. The need for collaboration across agencies and sectors has also been emphasised, he said.
Further, in the Budget Circular for 2017, the monitoring of the SDGs was further institutionalised, Jordan added, and the budget process requires that all Budget Agencies account for the relevant SDGs in their presentations at the Budget Hearings. In 2018, he also said, the Ministry of Finance advanced the process through the conduct of a mapping exercise to help agencies identify which specific targets within each SDG could be their responsibility.
Jordan said that the ministry had requested Budget Agencies to submit the indicators that they are using to measure their progress towards meeting the SDG targets by the end of January 2019. However, he said this did not happen in a timely manner and, in some cases, not at all, thereby creating the need for the workshop. He noted that the submissions so far “are varied” in quality but voiced the hope that the workshop would advance the data collection process further to put the country in a better position to undertake the VNR, the final draft of which has to be completed by the end of May. He added that he anticipated that workshop would deliver the outputs that will enable the country to not only accelerate the preparation of Guyana’s VNR, but, more importantly, the strengthening of its data systems so that the national performance commitments, including the SDGs, are measured and the sectors can be held accountable for delivering the services they were mandated to.
