UNFPA in Belize teamed up today with the Statistical Institute of Belize and the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean for a regional workshop. The main objective is to build capacity and enhance the way data and statistics are collected. We learned more about it at the opening ceremony.
Carlos Pol, CEO, Ministry of Economic Development
"You know that for us, for the government, for us to make informed decisions, we need statistics. Not just statistics but accurate and reliable and timely statistics so that's one of the objectives that we are achieving for this workshop. The second thing is working in collaboration and partnering with our Caribbean countries. It's important for us when we develop something, we develop for the benefit of our country yes but our region, the Caribbean is for all of us and we're here to support our Caribbean brothers and sisters."
Helena Cruz Castanheira, Population Affairs Officer, CELADE, ECLAC
"The objective of the workshop is to strengthen capacities and also build connections of the people that works with the data of estimates and projections so the demographic analysis and the importance of population estimate is almost all the denominators for data and analytics so strengthening the capacities of NSO's to do this proper analysis and to have the capacity to analyze services, data, and have estimates and projection it's very important for planning and building social policy."
Diana Castillo Trejo, Executive Director, SIB
"When we did the last census, what we noted, and it's something that we were expecting, that the census count came out less than what was originally projected and what we found that there was a serious deficiency in our method of estimating population and what we did then was we did an exercise of revamping our own methodology and so this training here will just serve to strengthen that and further improve so that moving forward, we don't have instances of that kind of deficiency."
Tisa Grant, Liaison Specialist/Head of Office, UNFPA Belize
"We thought that it would be best to expand this opportunity, partner with ECLAC to make it possible and just maximize the resources that we currently have under the KOICA Korea funded project in Belize to make it happen for the subregion."
