Conference on 'Measuring Small and Indigenous Populations', 14–15 April Wellington, New Zealand.

From 14–15 April, the International Association for Official Statistics (IAOS) held a conference on 'Measuring Small and Indigenous Populations' in Wellington, New Zealand. Invited to organize a session on Pacific population and development issues, Gerald Haberkorn convened Session 5 on the opening day, entitled Population and development in the Pacific Islands – rediscovering the relevance of good data and information management, which proved a popular session, attended by some 60 people.

Arthur Jorari from SPC’s Demography Population programme kicked off proceedings with a presentation entitled: Providing Context – reporting facts. Upcoming challenges in improving data capture and quality in 2010 round of censuses. Acknowledging that national population and housing censuses provide the very foundation for the collection of demographic and social statistics and thus yield the main empirical evidence for policy development and planning, it is imperative that censuses are conducted on a regular basis, and adequately resourced to provide good quality data and information. Arthur’s presentation examined some of the key problem areas and bottlenecks experienced during the 2000 round of Pacific censuses, discussed their implications on data utilization, and proposed some basic measures NSOs and their international development partners need and can undertake to achieve tangible improvements in data quality and increased utilisation in the 2010 round of censuses, which starts with Kiribati in 2005.

The second presentation was by Leilua Taulealo and Benuel Lenge from the Samoa and Vanuatu statistics national statistics offices respectively, talking about the importance of increasing the accessibility to good data and statistics, and getting this information out to data users. In a paper entitled “Providing meaning – moving from products to providing a service”, Leilua and Ben discussed the contribution of their respective national population Geographic information systems to increase data accessibility (with Polini Bosetu, also making a presentation of the Solomon PopGIS in another session dealing with national planning issues).

The session was rounded off with a third presentation by Professor Dick Bedford from Waikato University, entitled Urbanization of Pacific Populations, which illustrated the ongoing demand for meaningful content, in the form of good and topical population analysis and research, to ensure the complex information on critical population issues with broad social, economic and environmental implications such as the growing urbanisation of Pacific island people, is fed into the policy cycle on an ongoing basis.

In another conference session dedicated to Official statistics and ethnicity, Gerald Haberkorn presented a paper entitled Population census and ethnicity – where is the issue, what are the concerns?, reflecting on the ‘ethnicity-free’ 2004 census of New Caledonia, and the controversies surrounding the cancellation of the original census in 2003, because of its intended inclusion of questions on ethnicity and tribal affiliation.