OECS Secretariat, Castries, St. Lucia, Thursday September 29^th  2011. The Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS) Secretariat will from 4^th – 6^th October 2011 convene a meeting of OECS Directors of Statistics in St. Lucia to discuss OECS Statistical Developments in the context of the OECS Economic Union.

The overarching objective of the meeting will be to inform OECS Directors of Statistics of the latest developments with respect to the Secretariat’s ongoing and planned statistical initiatives, couched within the context of the OECS Economic Union, and to ensure the full involvement and commitment of Member States to the successful implementation of these initiatives.

A number of reports and proposals will be presented to Directors of Statistics for discussion, feedback and endorsement, including:

1)      A recently concluded consultancy report on the establishment of an OECS Statistics and Research Unit (supported with funding from the World Bank), which has implications for the strengthening of statistical capacity at both national and regional levels;

2)      A report on the results and practices employed for the pilot OECS Labour Force Survey, which was recently undertaken in Grenada;

3)      An update on the current status and plans to advance a proposed OECS Regional Strategy for the Development of Statistics;

4)      An update on an ongoing World Bank funded Technical Assistance project focussing on household surveys and poverty analysis; and

5)      A proposal to establish a performance management framework, inclusive of a set of core statistical indicators, to monitor implementation of the outputs and outcomes of the OECS Economic Union.

Sean Curtis Mathurin at the OECS Secretariats says: “this meeting of OECS Directors of Statistics is a vital step towards achievement of the goal of responding to the information needs generated by the creation and advancement of the OECS Economic Union and other OECS developmental initiatives”.

The Meeting is being financed with grant resources from the World Bank Trust Fund for Statistical Capacity Building and Partnership in Statistics for Development in the 21st Century (PARIS21), and supported with technical assistance from the International Labour Organization’s Sub-regional Office for the Caribbean.