Top statisticians from OECS Member States met in St. Lucia Wednesday July 27 th to review progress on a project designed to better equip their offices to plan and execute poverty surveys in their respective countries.

The statisticians form the Technical Advisory Committee for the World Bank financed MECOVI Project, being executed by the Social Policy Unit of the OECS Secretariat. MECOVI is the Spanish acronym for ‘Programme for Improvement of Surveys and Measurement of Living Conditions in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Wednesday’s meeting reviewed the work done in the just completed first phase of the project, and examined ways the various countries could implement the recommendations to build institutional capacity to carry out the surveys.

In the past these living conditions or poverty surveys were done by extra regional consultants who then took their skills back with them. The MECOVI project is expected to help develop a group of officers in the region with the required competence to execute the surveys using relevant computer software.