The Department of Statistics launched it’s new logo on February 14th 2011.
The following is the statement made by Ms. Makini Hickinson, MBA who is the Head of Department of Statistics (as seen in the picture above) during the launching:
The intent of this presentation is to basically provide the public of St. Maarten with general information about the dept. , and to unveil our brand new department logo.
Today I will present to you, who we are as a dept., what we aim to achieve in the short to medium term, I will reveal our distinct dept. logo and lastly leave you with our contact information.
STAT, is the entity officially charged with the collection, processing and dissemination of statistical information for the country St. Maarten.
However we are doing so with a new name & as you will see a bit later also with a new look.
STAT’s main responsibility is to execute statistical research for the public sector, private sector, science, and the general public. Thus the collection & publishing of official statistics related to the economic, demographic, social and environmental status of the St. Maarten community.
The Dept. of Statistics is an execution agency which resorts under the ministry of Tourism, Economic Affairs, Traffic & Transportation, and is therefore one of the responsibilities of the honourable Minister Franklin Meyers. The dept. has a formation of 12 persons; these are broken down by the dept. head, an executive secretary, 3 senior researcher functions in the areas of economic, social and demographic statistics, 3 researcher functions in the areas of household & price statistics, business & tourism statistics & ICT support, and finally 4 assistant researcher functions. Currently we are staffed with a total of 8 persons and there are 2 critical vacancies which can hopefully be filled this year.
How do we function?
STAT executes its statistical task according to the main existing legislation namely, the Statistics Ordinance of 1976, and the national decree of the organization & mission of the statistical office, 2003.
These laws stipulate that persons & businesses are obliged to provide the statistical office with data for the purpose of generating its statistics, but also protects the privacy of these respondents, such that the statistical office is also obliged to treat the data in strict confidence.
STAT collects data via field research, thus by means of taking censuses, other surveys, also via the use of existing data in administrative records of public & private entities.
STAT is at the moment still cooperating with CBS Curacao mainly to share knowledge & experiences in producing statistics & using specific systems. A training program is currently ongoing with STAT staff.
Although STAT is a government entity, we seek to set our annual statistical program, determine which methodologies it will use in its research and lastly how & when the results will be made public. I wish to stress that our department will be working hard at building trust between us & the many respondents that we depend on for statistical data. We emphasis the fact that all data submitted to STAT is used solely for the purpose of generating statistical information about Country St .Maarten and will not be passed on to other government entities in an unprocessed form.
With this aim in mind, we decided to come up with a distinct department logo, which would hopefully create some separation between our research work and the remainder of the government organization. From this point onwards, this new logo will be used instead of the old CBS logo, and will appear on all our documentation & materials, such as our survey questionnaires, letterheads, business cards, and our future publications.
Basically the logo has a simple but nice design; we used what we consider to be traditional SXM colors, (blue & red, colors that are found on our flag), a big part of what we do is also presenting data and results, so we thought a bar graph would be a good way to represent this aspect of our work. We incorporated this bar graph showing a growing trend, as we hope to see positive development in St. Maarten’s economy & society. There’s also our official dept. abbreviation ‘STAT’ on the top. Lastly we included an outline of the SXM map, to basically indicate the fact that all the statistics we produce is for the benefit of the entire SXM population. And we put that in green, as we all strive for a more environmentally friendly SXM.
The STAT Logo itself has been designed & created internally, by one of the newest Researchers, to join the STAT team, Mrs. Saskia Thomas-Salomons. We at the dept. are quite proud of this fact, and would especially like to thank her for the creative work she has put into it, and we are proud of the final outcome.
I’d like to close this session with the department’s contact details, persons are free to contact us for any further information they might need.
Statistics related to SXM can still be found on the CBS website, but can also now be found on STAT’s dept. page on the www.sintmaartengov.org website.
The following is the presentation that was showed during the launch: