The staff of the Central Statistics Office are the recipients of a two-week regional training workshop on the use of specialized software called REDATAM for the dissemination of census and survey microdata.
REDATAM has been widely used by national statistical offices in Latin America for many years and is increasingly being used by statistical offices in the Caribbean as well as some countries in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific. Francis Jones, Population Affairs Officer with the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) was the lead facilitator for the training workshop.
“We’re providing training in a software programme which ECLAC, for many years owned, developed, and programmed. We support primarily the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean region in using this software which is basically about providing users of government statistics, so Saint Lucia Statistical Office will use it to provide better, richer, and deeper access to census data for their users.”
Since the first introduced to statistical offices in the Caribbean in the 1990s, the number of countries using REDATAM for online dissemination of census data has grown to nine with more expected to be added to the list of users.
“Saint Lucia has made a lot of use of it in the past. The last three censuses going back to the 1990 census, Saint Lucia has used this software. But, partly because the census is a 10-year event and naturally you have staff turnover so we’re back in Saint Lucia after a good few years. We would have trained earlier generations of statisticians in Saint Lucia using this software and with the office just in the process now of having collected and processing their census data, now is a very opportune moment for us to come and train the new staff in how they can use this software to disseminate the census results.”
Senior IT Officer with the Central Statistics Office, Bert Collimore said the REDATAM software allows the survey and census data to be readily accessible by a variety of stakeholders.
“So after we have done the initial phases of data capture and collection, you need to disseminate the data to the public to make it useable by policymakers, academics, whoever is interested in finding creative ways to use Saint Lucia’s data…People can access it however they want. It is a dynamic platform in the sense that it is not static. You don’t produce static tables that are just there. The users have the ability now with that dynamic application to create different analyses and different uses of the data right at their fingertips.”
During the workshop, prototype applications for the dissemination of data from Bahamas’ and Saint Lucia’s censuses were developed. These applications will be finalised and made available online. The workshop was conducted from Monday 27th November – Friday 8th December 2023.