(Friday September 16, 2011 OECS Secretariat CastriesSt. Lucia) The Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS) Secretariat, in collaboration with the Sub-regional Office for the Caribbean of the United Nations Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA), will from 19^th – 23^rd September, 2011 convene a training exercise in Computer Editing of Population and Housing Census Data in Antigua and Barbuda.

The training activity, requested by OECS Member States, comes on the heels of the recently signed OECS/UNFPA Memorandum of Understanding, which recognises specific linkages between the mandates of the respective organisations and is designed to further strengthen those ties through collaboration on population programmes, including demographic data collection and analysis, reproductive health and gender. Sean Curtis Mathurin of the OECS Secretariat says: “The workshop is intended to provide participants with a better understanding of the census databases expected to be developed by OECS countries in 2011/2012, assist with addressing data processing challenges, and contribute to developing a plan for the way forward in this area.”

This workshop complements an earlier training activity held in November 2010, by building further on the skills and knowledge of OECS statisticians in data editing techniques and procedures. OECS countries were expected to work over the past year on their preliminary data editing manuals and programs and should now have questions and queries based on their application. Mathurin says the workshop will also incorporate tabulation procedures and techniques, with a view to catering to specific tabulation needs of participating countries. CSPro Software and its applications will be used as the database processing package: “The workshop is expected to contribute to the successful processing of census data in preparation for its tabulation, which is a vital step in the successful implementation of the OECS Population and Housing Censuses in 2011, and the production of comparable data useful for policy and decision making, as the OECS Member States continue the implementation of Economic Union.”