The NMDI Database, designed last year in consultation with member countries and technical and financial partners, is currently being populated by the Statistics for Development Programme, and will add a whole new range of indicators to the PRISM database. Addressing Pacific Plan Strategic Objective 12.4, this activity continues our work to upgrade and extend country and regional information systems and databases across key sectors.

At the moment, this database covers 190 indicators across 10 thematic areas, with Health (54) and Population and Development (25), Agriculture and Forestry (15), Gender (12), Cultural practice (12), Fisheries and Aquaculture (19), ICT (17), Youth (7), Energy (5) and Transport (24).

These indicators are being collected from primarily national data sources, and will be presented in a fully customized online database from which thematic subsets can be downloaded, such as all indicators pertaining to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), or those addressing cross-thematic policy areas, such as food security, with relevant information extracted from the Health, Agricultural and Fisheries subsets, for example. It will also provide a more robust central source of Pacific Regional Indicators from which a variety of charting and mapping products can be developed.

As new data will be added to this database, it will be delivered as an RSS feed or an 'Automatic Notification', which can be fed right into your email inbox so you can be kept up-to-date.

In terms of reports there will be a fully flexible system of country-based or indicator-based reporting in both Excel and PDF formats, so users can easily track sectoral developments, and as importantly identify continued data gaps - which will provide useful information for Governments and their development partners on where to invest further in terms of statistical collections. The paper presented to the 2010 3rd Regional Conference of Heads of Planning and Statistics in July 2010 provides more detailed information.

Gerald Haberkorn, Manager
James Hemphill, Web Developer/Data Dissemination Specialist