In a formal ceremony held in Santo Domingo, the Dominican Republic’s National Statistics Office (ONE) has unveiled its third iteration of the National Statistical Plan (PEN) for the 2025-2028 period, a comprehensive strategic framework designed to unify and elevate the nation’s official statistical production, ensuring all public policy decisions are rooted in verifiable, high-quality data.
As the successor to the 2013-2016 and 2021-2024 national statistical plans, this four-year initiative was developed in compliance with the requirements of Law 1-12, which governs the country’s 2030 National Development Strategy. The planning process included systematic updates to national inventories of statistical operations and administrative records, as well as broad consultation and validation workshops that brought together stakeholders from across the entire National Statistical System.
A core foundational contribution of the new PEN is a country-wide gap assessment that mapped 880 high-priority indicators aligned with four key national and global frameworks: the National Development Strategy 2030, the National Multi-Year Public Sector Plan, the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, and the Montevideo Consensus on Population and Development. The assessment delivered clear insights into the current state of Dominican statistical production: 47% of the mapped indicators can already be fully measured using existing data resources, 33% require incremental upgrades to current collection and processing systems, and 20% suffer from substantial data gaps. The most severe gaps are concentrated in under prioritized areas including cultural statistics, construction and infrastructure tracking, social security reporting, and cross-cutting demographic and social statistics.
ONE officials frame the identification of these unaddressed gaps as a core component of the institution’s commitment to governmental transparency and continuous improvement of the national statistical ecosystem. The entire plan is structured around three overarching strategic priorities that address the gaps and weaknesses uncovered in the assessment.
The first priority is boosting the production and public dissemination of timely, accurate statistics. Key actions under this goal include expanding the use of existing administrative records and integrating non-traditional data sources into official production, as well as generating far more granular data disaggregated by sex, age, and geographic territory. Currently, administrative records already support 65% of the Dominican Republic’s official statistical operations, making expanded use of these resources a cost-effective path to improvement.
The second priority centers on strengthening the legal and institutional foundation of the National Statistical System through the adoption of a nationwide quality assurance framework that standardizes practices across all participating institutions. The plan formally integrates the National Code of Good Practices for Official Statistics and adopts guidelines aligned with the Generic Statistical Business Process Model to bring consistency to data production workflows across all agencies.
The third and final priority targets the expansion of technical capacity across the public sector, delivered through ongoing professional training for statistical personnel hosted by the National School of Statistics.
A public perception survey conducted during the plan’s development process underscored broad confidence in the national statistical system: 94% of responding institutions, academic researchers, and regular data users reported that they trust the output produced by Dominican statistical bodies.
Speaking at the launch event, ONE Director General Mildred Martínez emphasized that sustained high quality in official statistics is a collective responsibility. Beyond the work of ONE itself, she noted, reliable data depends on consistent standards and careful work across all public institutions and individual professionals tasked with collecting, processing, and documenting raw information.
Representatives from the Dominican Ministry of Finance and Economy and the United Nations System used the launch to reaffirm the critical link between robust national development planning and trustworthy statistical information. They noted that the PEN will directly strengthen the monitoring and evaluation of all public policies by providing consistent, granular data to track progress toward national development objectives, including the country’s commitments under the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.
The initiative has received ongoing support from the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), which has provided targeted technical assistance to strengthen Dominican statistical capacity and advance the use of disaggregated data that captures disparities across demographic and geographic groups.