Costa Rica: Microdata Outreach Workshop (October 2014)
A Microdata Outreach Workshop (MOW) for users and producers was co-hosted by the National Statistics Office of Costa Rica (INEC) and PARIS21 on 27 – 28 October 2014. The objectives of this 2-day workshop were to:
1) promote data available at INEC and the National Statistical System
2) instruct both users and producers on how to locate the relevant data and metadata on the INEC website
3) review the procedures for requesting microdata
4) demonstrate the documentation standards (DDI and Dublin Core) and ANDA (National Data Archive) as dissemination standards
5) discuss the policy and regulations for data dissemination in INEC
6) facilitate dialogues between users and producers on data availability, access, use and ways to collaborate in the future
Over 65 participants attended the meeting, and opening remarks were made by Floribel Mendez,Director General, INEC; Leslie Rae, Partnership Coordinator, PARIS21; Eduardo Prado, President, Central Bank and John Fonseca, Vice Minister, COMEX (Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade).
Each opening statement addressed the importance of all of the producing agencies to collaborate together and work under the coordination of INEC and Central Bank. They also referenced the importance of adhering to international standards, as Costa Rica has been invited to work more closely with the OECD with a view to a decision on its accession in 2015. In this regard, COMEX gave a thorough presentation to the participants about the accession process at the OECD, the roadmap leading up to the decision in 2015 and the importance of quality statistics. PARIS21 Consultant for LAC, Federico Segui, provided presentations on the ADP/IHSN Program and reviewed many of the tools designed to assist in documentation and dissemination.
A concurrent DDI Expansion Workshop was undertaken from the 27 - 31 October 2014. The objective of the workshop was to reinforce the use of the IHSN tools for data documentation in the agencies of the National Statistical System (NSS) and further reinforce the documentation activities that was in progress. The workshop was coordinated by the National Institute of Statistics of Costa Rica (INEC) who has widely implemented the ADP Initiative, elaborating a dissemination policy to provide data access to different users. Currently INEC’s NADA Catalog is active and running and will soon house statistical projects of the NSS agencies as well. The workshop was attended by 14 participants from the NSS. The five day-training course introduced half of participants to the IHSN tools and best practices in data documentation and reinforce skills for the other half. As a result of the workshop, 14 statistical operations were documented. This initiative is part of a national statistics plan to improve the quality of the statistics produced by the NSS to OECD standards by adapting methodologies as well as implementing international standards such as DDI and Dublin Core to initiate a certification process to assure comparability a high quality across the NSS.
