A website containing statistics on the country’s development progress, will be launched next year by the Planning Institute of Jamaica (PIOJ), and the Statistical Institute of Jamaica (STATIN), through collaboration with the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF).

The announcement was made last Friday at the Terra Nova Hotel in Kingston at the release of the 2007 version of the development tracking database, JamStats.

The site, which will be an extension of the current database, should be ready by mid-2008 and should provide data on sectors such as education, health, the economy and the environment to policymakers, government officials, students and ordinary Jamaicans.

The introduction of the website and the circulation of the JamStat software, are expected to make information more readily available to the public and free up statisticians in both agencies so they can work on collating and representing data.

“If JamStats can become prime data, it will relieve statisticians within government to focus on the real reason they are there,” said JamStat director, Dorreth Edmondson.

“We want to enhance statistical literacy so we are currently giving the database to schools and training teachers and fifth and sixth formers to use it. One of the challenges, however, is how to change the perceptions and get people to use the software instead of going to a book and skipping pages,” she added.

This year’s 5.0 version has several new features including the addition of maps which show the location of schools, hospitals, police stations, parish councils and geographical features such as rivers. JamStats 2007 also has several more indicators than the previous version, boasting 157 up from 98. The software is also integrated with the Microsoft Office Suite of applications.

Despite the additions and improvements, however, Edmondson admitted that there were some shortcomings.

“We weren’t able to identify data for all 157 indicators so we have some data gaps…but it’s not the end. It is part of the process of policy making. JamStats is not and cannot be a panacea, but it provides a way of tracking our progress and it assists in pointing to the major gaps in the data collection processes,” she said Friday.