New System in place to track Saint Lucia’s Progress on the MDGs

(CARICOM Secretariat, Turkeyen, Greater  Georgetown, Guyana)     The Government of St. Lucia has launched HelenInfo, its adaptation of DevInfo 5.0., a mechanism to monitor statistics and indicators. HelenInfo, was launched on 13 April 2007 under a joint collaborative arrangement instituted primarily by the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) Secretariat and UNICEF to strengthen statistical capacity in the area of Social Statistics in the Region, a critical factor being access to data by users for decision-making, policy formulation and research. The development of HelenInfo also benefited from substantial assistance from the European Commission and the UNDP.

DevInfo is a statistical tool that allows tracking of baseline data relating to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) which was initially introduced by UNICEF and for which a number of training sessions have been organized in the region by UNICEF and UNDP under the leadership of CARICOM.

HelenInfo includes a small publication and an installation CD that also provides statistics on inter-census demographic trends, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and the local socio-economic environment. The package uses the DevInfo mapping technology to geographically reference a large number of the indicators by sub-national administrative districts.

According to the government of St. Lucia, the process of developing HelenInfo was challenging in that it involved the coordination and consolidation of data collection and compilation efforts from a large number and variety of private and public sector sources. Nevertheless, the process offered the opportunity to fortify the inter-agency collaboration that is most crucial to the efficient, relevant and sustainable provision of domestic indicators on social, economic and human development.

The HelenInfo team, comprised members from the Central Statistics Office, the Department of Economic Affairs in the Ministry of Finance and the corporate planning units of the Ministries of Education, Agriculture, Social Transformation and other relevant government ministries. They have continued to work on the improvement and updating of the HelenInfo package. Planned improvements include the introduction of geo-referenced data at the settlement level and a web-based application of the HelenInfo software.

The team expresses its sincere gratitude to the numerous individuals and agencies throughout the domestic, regional and international communities that have contributed to the success of the HelenInfo project thus far.