Diana Castillo, Director, General Statistical Institute of Belize
"Today's high-level advocacy forum, as well as the weeks various meetings is being held under the theme. Improving lives through statistics strengthening and innovating together it provides a unique opportunity to bring together and an array of high-level government officials from across the region representatives from various international agencies, regional experts and heads of nationals, statistic offices with a view to strengthening the partnerships that are among the most critical to the development of statistics in our region, more importantly however the relationships that we are seeking to build and revitalize and this for are key to ensuring that power of the data is effectively harnessed to guide decisions that will bring about meaningful enhancement the quality of life for all our people. The value of these relationships and their potential for driving positive change is especially pronounced within our present context in which resources are scarce, but there is no scarcity of issues that require urgent intervention, especially among the most vulnerable among our populations."

John Briceno, Prime Minister
"Data is widely recognized as one of the most valuable resources available to our countries . This is reflected in the ever increasing demand for new data, produced more quickly made more widely available and with sufficient details as to allow for greater disaggregation and more meaningful analysis. This is an objectively positive development as it signals a clear shift towards evidence based planning decision-making and response to eminent challenges, our world faces, and yet for small countries like ours it has placed an incredible amount of pressure on our already under resource national statistical offices, and national statistical systems. Now I may regret saying this when the budget time comes because Ms Castillo tells me they are already understaffed. Indeed, since the endorsement for the regional strategy for the development of statistics, our Caribbean national statistics office have numerous challenges in their efforts to operationalize, were even further exasperated in the week of the COVID-19 outbreak.. when national statistical systems were required to provide to support government response in almost real time you all had to work with significantly reduced budget and hundreds or thousands of lives, depending on the accuracy of the data your office produced. To their great credit, data systems around the world were able to adapt and innovate supporting the largest ever data driven response to a global crisis."

This event will continue up to Friday November 8th.