Analysing baseline data to assess the impact of COVID-19 on households

At the request of the OECS Member States of Grenada and St. Kitts and Nevis, the OECS Commission, through its Statistical Services Unit, partnered with the World Bank to deliver technical assistance in data analysis. The Survey of Living Conditions - Household Budget Survey (SLC-HBS) in Grenada and St. Kitts and Nevis, which were both conducted between 2018 and 2019, collected critical information on the social and economic conditions experienced by households and were in turn used to produce indicators of well-being, poverty and inequality.

Poverty data are particularly important now, as countries are grappling with the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. The data collected through the SLC-HBS can provide good benchmarks of the proportion of vulnerable persons who are at risk of becoming poor as well as key information on the scale of inequality, which is likely to be exacerbated by the pandemic.  

The training focused on the use of ADePT, an open source tool developed by the World Bank to automate and standardise the production of analytical reports from household surveys. The sessions were tailored for the staff of the Grenada Central Statistics Office (CSO) and the St. Kitts and Nevis Department of Statistics (DOS), who are responsible for analysing the SLC-HBS data. Eleven staff members of the CSO and DOS and two staff members of the OECS Commission attended the workshop. 

The SLC-HBS forms part of the OECS Sustainable Household Data Production Programme (SDP) that seeks to increase the frequency and quality of data collected to monitor micro dimensions of well-being, including poverty, as well as measuring the progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).  

Additional and complementary support for the SLC-HBS is being provided to all OECS Member States under the Enhanced Country Poverty Assessment Project, including technical assistance to clean the survey data and produce monetary and multi-dimensional poverty indicators as well as support with consultancy services to develop national reports of living conditions. Five OECS Member States have undertaken the SLC-HBS, namely, British Virgin Islands, Grenada, Saint Lucia, St. Kitts and Nevis and St. Vincent and the Grenadines. Saint Lucia is using its national report on living conditions to inform decisions and policies for social protection.

This workshop contributes to the availability of and access to country comparable social data which is aligned to the objectives of the OECS Regional Strategy for Development in Statistics (RSDS), strategic priority 3: Join the Data Revolution. Launched in 2017, the OECS RSDS is the region’s 14-year statistical development master plan for the advancement of statistics.