Montserrat will be the venue for four regional statistics meetings in October, which will bring approximately 40 persons to the island over eight days.
The meetings which are being organised by the Statistics Department of Montserrat and CARICOM are scheduled to begin on Thursday, October 18 until Friday, October 26, and will be held at the Montserrat Cultural Centre in Little Bay.
From October 18 to 20, the ‘Twenty-Third Meeting of the CARICOM Advisory Group on Statistics’ will convene and the recommendations from this meeting will be presented to the ‘Forty-Third Meeting of the Standing Committee of Caribbean Statisticians (SCCS)’, which will also be held here from October 22 to 24.
The Forty-Third SCCS Meeting will focus on the overarching theme of the CARICOM Regional Strategy for the Development of Statistics (RSDS), ‘Building the Resilience of the Community’. The emphasis will be on the strategic framework of the CARICOM RSDS which was endorsed at the Thirty-Ninth Regular Meeting of the Conference of Heads of Government of the CARICOM. The RSDS is a masterplan for regional statistical development, geared to respond to the statistical needs of regional policy objectives of the integration agenda and national development plans and priorities.
Then on October 25, the Twenty-Ninth Meeting of the Regional Census Coordinating Committee (RCCC) will convene a one day meeting focusing on advancing preparations for the 2020 Round of Population and Housing Censuses in Member States as they relate to the regional strategy of support and initiatives, and of national and international initiatives that may have already commenced. The CARICOM Regionally-Coordinated Census Strategy for the 2020 Round will also be the focus of this meeting.
The final meeting, scheduled for October 26, is the ‘Eleventh Regional Statistical Research Seminar’ which will consider papers on a range of topics and will develop key recommendations on the way forward pertinent to statistics. The aim is to develop a statistical development agenda that would allow for better understanding of the data; enable methodological research in specific areas of statistics; and facilitate the process of data dissemination to users.
The Eleventh Meeting of the Standing Committee of Caribbean Statisticians (SCCS) was held in Montserrat in 1986 (32 years ago).
These meetings will bring together Statisticians from several Caribbean islands to include Antigua and Barbuda, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and Grenadines, Grenada, The ABC islands-Aruba, Bonaire and Curacao, along with representatives from donor partners to include, the European Union, the Eastern Caribbean Central Bank (ECCB), Statistics Canada, United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) and the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS).
