Director of SUMMA: “We need more data to address the region’s inequalities” 

The Organization of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS) held during three days the Human Data for Development Conference. 

The director of SUMMA, Javier González, participated on the third day in the session on “Innovative regional data and information initiatives in the OECS”, together with Sonia Rees, Information Management Officer, OECS Program Management Unit; Rahym Augustin Joseph, U-Report OECS Intern, Dr. Roberta Caixeta, NCD Surveillance Regional Advisor, PAHO/WHO Department of NCDs and Mental Health, and Kurt Birson, Senior Economist and Data Analyst, USAID Data Services , M/CIO.

“What the pandemic has shown us is that we are in the same boat, and the only way forward is to collaborate, but collaboration can only be promoted with data and correct governance,” González said. He also added that “the pandemic revealed that our region is the most unequal in the world and also that we need more data to know how to act on these gaps.”

He then mentioned some of the projects that SUMMA is developing, some of them implemented by KIX LAC, related to the collection, dissemination and use of data for policy development. Among these projects, he introduced the regional survey “The Teacher’s Voice” that was carried out among more than 200 thousand teachers from 21 countries in the region; the Edu Data initiative, a platform of educational, social and economic indicators of the KIX LAC countries; and the Comprehensive and Socioemotional Learning Recovery Program (PRISA) developed in collaboration with the Ministry of Education of Panama.

The objectives of the conference were to showcase the innovation and development of data systems in the Caribbean and OECS region and to promote the OECS web-based tools as a data and information hub; improve the quality of awareness data, consistency of reporting (in emergencies/outages) and encourage systematic use of disaggregation and data dissemination for informed decision-making; and display human and social data from the OECS region and mitigation measures for continued data collection during COVID 19.

Together with OECS, SUMMA leads the Knowledge and Innovation Exchange Center for Latin America and the Caribbean (KIX LAC), a joint initiative of the Global Partnership for Education – GPE – and the International Development Research Center (IDRC). that brings together the most diverse actors in education.

Its objective is to contribute to the strengthening of the educational systems of the associated countries: Dominica, El Salvador, Granada, Guatemala, Guyana, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua, Saint Lucia and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines.