The Thirty-Seventh Regular Meeting of the Conference of Heads of Government of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) was held at Georgetown, Guyana, on 4 – 6 July 2016. The Prime Minister of Dominica, the Honourable Roosevelt Skerrit, chaired the proceedings.
Chairman of the Conference, the Honourable Roosevelt Skerrit reminded the audience that CARICOM was a primary community built on empathy and caring for each other. He said that at the individual level this is continuously being reinforced, whenever or wherever people interact. He called on all to work together to strengthen cooperation and collaboration so as to create a stronger, more vibrant community. “Let us therefore focus more closely on what needs to be done to strengthen CARICOM, to make it more economically competitive and generate resources to sustain our togetherness. Our resilience is being tested more than before, but we have proven time and again that we are strong” the Chairman said.
Among matters on the agenda included one relating to the statistics, under the heading, „Action Plan for Statistics in the Caribbean‟
Heads of Government were asked to note the challenges and issues faced throughout the CARICOM region in the production of statistics and consider the action plan for statistics which was presented by the Prime Minister of Grenada who is a trained statistician and holds a Ph.D. in in Mathematics and Statistics.
Heads of Government endorsed the importance of statistics to the Region‟s efforts to attain sustainable development, continuous improvement in the standard of living, empowerment of Community nationals, governance, planning and policy making and progress towards the CSME.
Heads of Government considered and endorsed the Action Plan which among other things seeks to strengthen national statistical systems. The Plan enables the upgrading of the Information and Communications Technology infrastructure and provides overall support to human resource development.
There are a number of areas of the action plan that relate to work which would strengthen statistics in the context of Anguilla. These include but are not limited; to the development of the National Statistical System and the National Strategy for the Development of Statistics (NSDS), the infusion of statistics in the education system to lead to versed data scientists and the promotion of greater professionalism among persons employed in the area of statistics.