Canadian Govt to invest $M

Canadian Govt to invest $M
By CAROL MATROO Wednesday, January 27 2016

THE Canadian government is investing CAN$19.5 million to help transform the Central Statistical Office into the National Statistical Institute (NSI) by January 1, 2017. The government was funding a new statistical capacity building initiative for the Caribbean region: the Project for the Regional Advancement of Statistics in the Caribbean (PRASC).

This initiative was aimed to strengthen the statistical system of the Caribbean in order to improve socio- economic measure and support evidence- based policy making. On the first day of a three-day regional seminar on the Fundamental Role of Administrative Data in Official Statistics, hosted by the CSO at Hilton Trinidad, yesterday, it was revealed that the project would be conducted over seven years, from April 2015 to March 2022.

Through PRASC, Statistics Canada worked with National Statistical Offices (NSOs) of the 14 participating countries to develop methods and approaches that could eventually be used by the statistical system of all Caribbean countries.

CSO director Sean O’Brien said they had been mandated to make the transformation to ensure that National Statistical Offices (NSOs) had a high measure of independence.

He said the NSI would be removed from Central Government which would make it more autonomous.

He said the United Nations fundamental principles with official statistics advocated that the NSO should be the supervisor of the National Statistical System (NSS).

“Independence must not just be present, but it must be seen to be present. Many persons outside the area of statistics would not really understand the difference between the NSO and the NSS, but NSO can produce official statistics as they need to without the help of the rest of the NSS.

“We cannot produce health statistics outside the Health Ministry.

We cannot produce education statistics without the cooperation of the Education Ministry. The fact of the matter is, many of the Satellite Statistical Agencies outside of the NSO need some sort of statistical mentoring,” O’Brien said. He said statistical capacity building did not happen by happenstance, and there was no serendipity in statistical capacity building.

“Someone has to be there to maintain the standard to ensure compliance for a national statistical standard,” he said. O’Brien said at present the CSO in TT was not in an ideal position so as to fulfill the role of the supervisor of the NSS, thereby the new NSI in TT would be empowered to go into the national ministries and ensure compliance with the UN Fundamental principles with official statistics. He said this would ensure compliance with international practices and compliance with good statistical practice.

“I do not know if you all believe in divine intervention, but PRASC is here at a time when we need them the most.

We need statistical capacity building at this point in our history more than we ever did before because in the context of TT, we do not want the change from the CSO to the NSI to be cosmetic.

We do not want it to be merely a change in name, we want it to move from an organisation at one level to one at a much higher level. To enable this we need statistical capacity building-- enter PRASC,” O’Brien said.