In preparation for the Climate Change and Labour Force Survey 2023, staff from the Cook Islands Statistics Office attended a week long “Training workshop on work and labour force statistics” held in Fiji from the 28th August – 1st September 2023. A Cook Islands’ Statistic Officer reports “the workshop was a successful one week of learning from our facilitators and sharing with our Pacific neighbors Tonga and Fiji.”
The objective of this training was to enhance the capacity of the Statistics offices from the Cook Islands, Tonga and Fiji to prepare, conduct, and analyse data from labour force surveys, and contribute to updating information on:
1) The Countries’ Labour Market: this is based on the latest international standards of statistics on work, employment and labour underutilization adopted at the 19th International Conference of Labour Statisticians (19th ICLS)
2) The standards on work relationships (International Classification of Status in Employment, 2018) of the 20th ICLS
3) The statistics on informal economy from the upcoming 21st ICLS in October 2023.
The workshop was jointly organized by Tonga, Fiji and the Cook Islands and facilitated by International Labour Organization (ILO) in collaboration with the SPC Statistics for Development Division (SPC/SDD). The workshop was hosted by ILO Suva.
“One of our main goals before attending the workshop was to get a clear understanding of the latest standards from the last two ICLS conferences and the upcoming ICLS in October 2023. This was going to help us understand the flow of our questionnaire and therefore formulate our questions accordingly. I feel like we achieved that.” Reports one of the Statistics Officers.
“The one week allowed us to focus mainly on making sure that our questionnaire was working well and keep the errors to a minimum or none at all. We are confident that with the knowledge and understanding gained from the training we will be able to produce a questionnaire that is useful and reliable.”
The team are back and are now focusing on finalizing our questionnaire, ensuring all of the core LFS variables can be derived from the data we will collect, and enable us to produce our national key labour market indicators, including the SDG indicators.
We acknowledge and appreciate the continuous support from ILO Bangkok and Suva, SDD of SPC in Noumea, and also our neighboring countries Fiji and Tonga in sharing ideas and knowledge in the Pacific context.
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