On November 12, local Suriname time, Ronald Assen, chair of the country’s Statistics Commission (COMSTAT), issued a formal public statement expressing widespread indignation among his agency and its operational arm, the General Bureau of Statistics (ABS), over a glaring procedural oversight in a recent official study tour. The trip, organized by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), ran from October 14 to 16 this year and was intended to gather insights on strengthening national statistical systems and data governance from Jamaica’s established public data infrastructure. The five-member Surinamese delegation that traveled to Kingston was drawn exclusively from four non-statistical government ministries: the Ministry of Education, Science and Culture, the Ministry of Transport, Communications and Tourism, the Ministry of Land Policy and Forest Management, and the Ministry of Home Affairs. No representatives from COMSTAT or ABS, the two statutory bodies with core national mandates for overseeing all official statistical operations, were included in the delegation roster. The oversight extended beyond the tour itself: even when the returning delegation presented its key findings to Elizabeth Bradley, Director of International Cooperation at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, International Trade and International Cooperation, neither COMSTAT nor ABS were invited to attend the briefing, despite the fact that the trip’s central focus was national statistical capacity building. During their Jamaica visit, the delegation toured the Statistical Institute of Jamaica and other key agencies involved in national development planning and evidence-based policy design. Upon their return, the group published a set of formal recommendations calling for Suriname to roll out a unified national data strategy, scale up investment in the national statistical ecosystem, and embed the use of verified, high-quality official data across all stages of government policy formulation and implementation. Assen emphasized that COMSTAT and ABS fully endorse the substance of these recommendations, which align with longstanding priorities for Suriname’s public data sector. His criticism is directed solely at the exclusion of the two specialized statistical agencies from the entire process, which he describes as a deeply counterproductive misstep that wasted a valuable opportunity for targeted knowledge exchange. He noted that a properly composed delegation with COMSTAT and ABS subject matter experts would have been able to dive far deeper into Jamaica’s proven solutions to longstanding local statistical challenges, including low response rates from businesses, public agencies and households for official surveys, staffing retention gaps at the national statistics bureau, and targeted funding mechanisms to support both ABS’s core routine operations and specialized data collection initiatives such as quarterly unemployment surveys. In his statement, Assen called on the Directorate of International Cooperation to implement far more rigorous vetting for the composition of all future official study tours, to ensure relevant specialized technical agencies are centrally involved in knowledge-sharing activities, and to ensure that both international development funds and national budget allocations for such trips are deployed with maximum strategic efficiency. The formal complaint has been shared with Suriname’s Minister of Finance and Planning, the Director of the National Planning Office, and the Director of ABS for further follow-up.
COMSTAT verontwaardigd over studiereis Jamaica: ABS en statistiekcommissie gepasseerd
