Publication: Development of Disaster-Related Statistics Capacity in the Government of Anguilla
Loading...
Date
2022
ISSN
Published
2022
Author(s)
Abstract
In 2017, Hurricane Irma caused severe damages and losses in Anguilla. One life was lost, and homes and businesses across the island were severely damaged. The lead agency for this initiative is the Anguilla Statistics Department (ASD), which is the Central Statistics Office (CSO) of the country. The mandate of the Statistics Department is set out in section two of the Statistics Act of 2000. Fulfilling their mandate requires collaboration with many agencies within the Government of Anguilla (GoA). Due to a lack of official policies around data sharing within the GoA, the CSO relies on ad hoc arrangements with other agencies around the sharing of data. This has resulted in a lack of interoperability between various information systems and has required significant amounts of extra staff time to transform datasets into a form appropriate for the creation of statistics. In the wake of a disaster, these ad hoc arrangements prove even more difficult. The GoA has a centralized information and communication technology (ICT) unit (Department of Information Technology and E-Government Services [DITES]) tasked with operating the government-wide area network (G-WAN), computer servers, and voice over internet protocol phones, as well as developing and maintaining e-government systems. However, there is no national ICT strategy that would clearly define the priorities and initiatives of the GoA regarding ICT. The lack of a guiding strategy with associated policies and standards has led to agencies developing information systems that are not designed to be interoperable. According to the 2019 budget, the GoA has several in-progress information systems projects, including an upgrade to the Financial Management System (Smartstream), a Revenue Information System, a beneficial ownership system, a tax administration information system, and a data portal (the Anguilla Data Gateway). The need for guiding policies is appreciated by DITES and the CSO. DITES has produced a proposal for the development of an ICT strategy, and the CSO has been working on the development of the national statistical system since 2014. With limited resources available to complete the system, progress has been slow. To build resilience, access to good data, the right data to inform decisions, is crucial. To produce statistics in the aftermath of a disaster, the process for data sharing needs to be as seamless as possible, and interoperable systems are key to this. However, the CSO does not have a clear picture of the available information systems and applications in-house, which would be useful for this purpose, and the degree to which they are interoperable from a technical, policy, or enterprise culture point of view. The desired outcome of this project will be to create a springboard from which a response can be launched by the GoA to dynamically respond to the need for data to make decisions on time, with the knowledge and comfort that the data used are of high quality, mainly coherent and consistent after a disaster.
Link to Data Set
Citation
“World Bank. 2022. Development of Disaster-Related Statistics Capacity in the Government of Anguilla. © Washington, DC. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/38505 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”