Noumea, New Caledonia, 29 November, 2011. A first for the Pacific technical training on Labour Statistics and Labour Market Information & Analysis (LMIA) in the Pacific was opened yesterday (28/11/11) by the Deputy Secretary General of the Secretariat of the Pacific Community (SPC), Mr Richard Mann and ILO Director for the Pacific Island Countries, Mr David Lamotte. Targeting national staff from the Ministry of Labour, National Statistics Office and Provident Fund, this ILO-SPC collaboration brings together participants from 9 ILO member States: Fiji, Kiribati, Samoa, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Tuvalu, Republic of Marshall Islands, Vanuatu and Timor Leste.

The course is tailor-made for the Pacific on labour statistics and LMIA, and was developed by the ILO Department of Statistics with the support of ILO Offices in Bangkok and Suva, in close consultation with SPC’s Statistics for Development Programme. It’s development is based on a capacity-building needs assessment and is a outputs-oriented, participatory workshop that combines theoretical presentations, and group and country-specific practical work. International and national specialists, other experts and practitioners will lead the presentations and group practical exercises involving on-going country-level questionnaire design work and data analysis of survey results, which participants have brought to the training course.

In opening the training, the Deputy Director General for SPC, Mr. Richard Mann, highlighted the strong political recognition across the region of the importance of quality and timely statistical data and information to guide evidence-based decision making, making reference to the recent adoption by Pacific Island Leaders of the Port Vila Declaration on Accelerating Progress on the Achievement of the Millennium Development Goals (2010), the Cairns Compact on Strengthening Development Coordination in the Pacific, and SPC’s development of the Ten Year Pacific Statistics Strategy, 2011-2020. He emphasized that “labour statistics and LMIA are important components of a core set of development statistics and indicators for Pacific Island Countries and of the National Minimum Development Indicator database being developed by SPC”, looking at this workshop “as a first of hopefully other collaborative future activities between ILO and SPC”.

The course is designed to run for five days to training technical staff in PICs from National Statistical Offices and Ministries of Labour and National Provident Funds’ statistical units, who are the principal data producers and data analysts of labour statistics and labour market information in order to to promote a sound understanding of the need for underlying labour statistics concepts and the need for meaningful producer-user links to build strong LMIA system.

The ILO Director for the Pacific Island Countries, Mr David Lamotte highlighted the need for consistent, timely and reliable statistics to ensure informed and evidence based policy making. In addition he mentioned that, Improved Labour Market Information & Analysis is being requested by our national leaders senior policy makers and the partnership between SPC and ILO, as evident by this technical training, will help countries meet these challenges.

The ultimate objective of this technical training course is to improve the quality and impact of policies and programmes aimed at employment, training and the labour market for poverty reduction and decent work, through the better understanding and use of labour market information and analysis and labour statistics overall. This course endeavours to increase the capacity of relevant stakeholders to collect, analyse and interpret labour market information and statistics in order to contribute to, and to help achieve, strengthened national and regional labour market information and analysis systems.