2nd Technical Workshop on Statistical Literacy and Capacity Development for the Pacific

Background

SPC (Pacific Community), being a development organization, is working with multisectoral international and national stakeholders to respond to the Pacific challenges. SPC’s Statistics for Development Division (SDD) has the principal role in the implementation of the Ten Years Statistics Strategy (TYPSS) which outlines the development of capacity and capability across the region as an important milestone to achieve in the coming years. SDD in this regard works closely with a wide community of donors, the United Nations, and its divisions, for example, the United Nations Statistics Division (UNSD) which also serves as the secretariat of the Global Network of Institutions for Statistical Training (GIST), and the UN’s Statistics Institute for Asia and the Pacific (SIAP). This collaboration builds more sustainable statistical capacities through efficient, effective, and harmonized delivery of training at the sub-regional level that will enable the production and use of quality data and statistics. 

One of the challenges, for the Pacific countries, is the statistical capacity scores, e.g., Statistical Capacity Indicator (SCI) and Statistical Performance Indicator (SPI) developed by the World Bank, which consistently fall below the average scores from other regions of Asia and the Pacific. The challenges to improvement of scores also are linked to the applicability of such scores for the Pacific which requires region-specific contextualisation and then Pacific Statistical Capacity could be benchmarked that could help the region to develop over the years on these grounds.