31st National Statistics Month Celebration

By Dr Rex Casiple

On September 20, 1990, former President Corazon C. Aquino issued Presidential Proclamation No. 647, “Declaring the Month of October of Every Year as the National Statistics Month (NSM)”.

 The proclamation aimed to promote, enhance, and instill nationwide awareness and appreciation of the importance and value of statistics to the different sectors of society; and to elicit the cooperation and support of the general public in upgrading the quality and standards of statistics in the country.

The theme of this year’s 31^st NSM Celebration is “Bridging Digital Gaps: Making Information Available to All”. The theme recognizes the importance of digitalization but emphasizes the need to address social inequality in terms of access and use of information and communications technology (ICT).

Digitalization is the integration of digital technologies into everyday life by the digitization. Digitization is a process of converting information or data into a computer-readable format. Digital technologies are electronic tools, systems, devices and resources that generate, store or process data. Examples of these are social media, online games, multimedia and mobile phones. We have these technologies to support us in facing difficulties brought about by COVID 19 pandemic. We used this to bridge the gaps to make information easily accessible and available to all.

However, surveys showed that majority of Filipino households today lacked many of these technologies at home. This is a great challenge to us in facing the pandemic crisis today, on how to improve the digital power and statistical system in the country and to cope up with the demand for timely, accurate and useful statistics needed by our policymakers in combatting the problems brought out by the global pandemic.

The highlights of activities of this year’s observance of the 31^st NSM, from October 9-29, 2020 are Virtual Opening Ceremony; Statistical Infomercial Contest; Statistical Page Contest; Statistical Infographics Contest; Webinars of National Economic Development Authority (NEDA) and Philippine Statistical Association, Inc. Region VI Chapter (PSAI6); and Virtual Closing Ceremony on October 29, 2020.

The first NSM Virtual Opening Ceremony was spearheaded by the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) and the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) on October 9, 2020 via Zoom with Secretary Gringo Honasan II of DICT as Keynote Speaker. Statistical Infomercial Contest is an online contest in which NSM member agencies/organizations will prepare a video showcasing their office in a statistical manner. Infomercials of the participating agencies should be posted on the NSM Official Facebook Page on October 20, 2020 and will be open for public viewing until October 26, 2020.

The highlights of the contest is the People’s Choice Award in which two (2) participating agencies will be awarded for video entries with the most number of views and most number of reactions (like, love and care) on Facebook. Cut off of video engagements will be 3:15 PM of October 26, 2020. Statistical Page Contest is a search for the best statistical page of the official website of NSM member agencies/organizations. The search committee will check all the websites of the NSM member agencies/organizations, provincial government, and the city government of Bacolod and Iloilo.

Statistical Infographics is a contest for the best infographics or a graphic visual representation of data and statistics intended to present information quickly and clearly. This contest is open to all NSM members except for PSA as a non-contesting participant.

Finally, Statistics played important role in business, industry, government, and scientific research. It is an important tool in decision-making to combat the COVID 19 pandemic and its effect on the lives of at least one hundred million Filipino people living in the country today. As a tool in decision making, RIGHT statistics lead to the RIGHT decision.

Happy 31^st NSM everyone!