SVG government terminates the 2018 Poverty Assessment Report
The 2018 Poverty Assessment Report has been discontinued, the government of St. Vincent and the Grenadines (SVG) said in parliament on Tuesday.
Finance Minister Camilo Gonsalves made the declaration in response to a query about the Report from opposition MP Daniel Cummings.
Gonsalves said the 2018 Poverty Assessment Report is incomplete, and a decision was made to terminate the process for the following reasons:
1.” Incomplete, inaccurate, and misleading figures were unofficially and prematurely circulated to the public in late 2020, compromising the integrity of the ongoing assessment and its findings had the process continued and the published figures differed from those that were previously circulated unofficially. The government may have been accused of tampering with the data, and the credibility of the Ministry of Finance, and in particular the statistical office, would have been damaged. There was a considerable discrepancy between what was circulated and what was emerging internally in the data being collected. “The dissemination of incomplete, inaccurate, and misleading data for apparently partisan political purposes also led to an analysis of the credibility of the data collected prior to and revisions to the ways in which data are collected, stored, and analyzed by professionals in the bureaucracy.”
2. “The challenge to complete data collection surveys, interviews, and analysis during the COVID pandemic, and the volcanic eruptions were insurmountable and would have presented the problem of merging pre-pandemic, pre-volcano data with information gathered in the immediate aftermath of those cataclysmic events.”
3. “The socio-economic landscape of St. Vincent and the Grenadines has changed markedly since the bulk of the data collection commenced in 2018,” As we are aware, the country has experienced negative impacts from the pandemic and the eruptions of the La Soufriere volcano. “As such, indicators of poverty and vulnerability would have changed drastically and do not reflect the current realities on the ground.”
4.” A new assessment is currently being planned. Hence, the government remains committed to conducting this assessment. The survey is a cross-sectional study that analyses data from a population at a single point in time. It provides rates of poverty and vulnerability, identifies the determinants of poverty, and describes the features of the population. Accordingly, the assessment provides quantitative data on poverty and vulnerability”.
2025 poverty assessment
Gonsalves said the government signed a financing agreement with the World Bank on June 4, 2022, for $6 million USD to strengthen data collection and analysis in St. Vincent and the Grenadines.
“The World Bank has agreed to finance a survey of living conditions and has made available 478,000 USD for this activity,” Gonsalves said. A total of $300,521 was incurred on the 2018 poverty assessment at the point of extermination. “While the process was incomplete, some of the information collected still provides useful baseline data that will inform the analysis of trends and patterns in future assessments and surveys.”
Gonsalves said it was agreed with the World Bank that a new assessment of poverty would be conducted following the completion of the population and housing centre censuses.
“The methodology of the 2025 poverty assessment has not been confirmed; this will be determined at the OECS level as part of the OECS data for decision-making project.” “It is to be decided whether the diary method from 2008 or the recall method from 2018 or a combination of both methods would be used for the collection of the data,” Gonsalves stated.
