Based on a request from the Provincial Planning and Monitoring Department in the North Central Province (NCP) a four-day workshop designed by the Institute of Applied Statistics Sri Lanka (IASSL) was conducted for 30 officers of diverse fields from NCP.
This was to identify the weaknesses, problems, crises, and opportunities that a province can achieve in the area of sustainable development through the use of statistics.
The course was conducted at the Computer Laboratory, Department of Rural Development and the two resources persons were Professor in Applied Statistics University of Moratuwa and Chairman, Academic and Training Committee, IASSL Prof. T S G Peiris, and Professor in Applied Statistics, Wayamba University of Sri Lanka Prof. N R Abeynayake. Participants were also awarded certificates by the IASSL.
Provincial Planning and Monitoring Department in the North Central Province has identified the necessity to develop a group of public sector officers who have individual or common vision for searching social, economic, environmental, ethnical, or development problems, or crisis within the province and finding facts and solutions for them to help the sustainable development in NCP.
Prof. Peiris has an opinion that due recognition is not given to the applied statisticians in Sri Lanka although all government and private organization use statistics for their planning. He further emphasised that most government department collect large amount of data mainly through surveys and spend a lot of money and resources, but the full benefits of such data is not obtained mainly due to lack of skilled applied statisticians. Thus Prof. Peiris urge that such service can be obtained from the IASSL.
The participants had a hand on experience in analysing real survey data using SPSS, interpretation of results and report writing.
Although the use of social survey and analysis of such data is a very successful process, it is very little use of them to solve such problems in the public sector.
Based on the feedback from the participants, IASSL is now trying to organize similar workshops for the Executive Staff in Provincial Planning and Monitoring Departments in all other Provincial Councils.
IASSL has been conducting various workshop in different areas in statistics for researchers, medical doctors, planners, and post graduates students.
IASSL has been incorporated by the Parliament of Sri Lanka on 20th September 2011 under the Act No. 38 of 2011. The IASSL is the only professional body for Statistics in Sri Lanka and one of their main function is to train the government and private officers to use statistical data analysis for decision process.
More details are given in the institute website: www.iappstat.ac.lk.
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