The United Nations Statistical Institute for Asia and the Pacific (SIAP) in collaboration with the Government of Bangladesh through its Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS) conducted the Country Training Course on Survey Design, Poverty Analysis and Data Dissemination. The course was held from 23 to 27 March 2009 at SIAP, Chiba, Japan. The government of Bangladesh provided fellowships to all ten participants from BBS to attend the training course. The participants have improved their knowledge and skills in survey design, poverty analysis and dissemination of official statistics. .

The viability of SIAP's main programmes is largely on account of the continuous strong support from the host government of Japan. Implementation of this course was also realized by the collaborative efforts of Ministry of Internal Affaires and Communications (MIC), Government of Japan.

The full 5-day training course was designed by SIAP in close consultation with BBS. The course covered the following important topics: (1) Survey design for household-based surveys, including sampling techniques and issues related to data quality, (2) Poverty analysis, including concepts and definitions, measuring poverty and income distribution, (3) Application of statistical software STATA to analysis of poverty data, and (4) Data dissemination. The course consisted of lectures, discussions and hands-on exercises. The main advantage of having training at the Institute was that all SIAP’s lecturers/experts delivered lectures on their respective areas of expertise. Mr. Watanabe took charge of Japanese Economic Development, Mr. Furuta, Survey Design, Mr. De Silva, Poverty Analysis, Ms. Gereltuya, Application of STATA, and Mr. Hasan, Data Dissemination.

All ten participants successfully completed the course and received the certificates of the course completion. The course evaluation indicated that all participants found the course relevant to their work, and they were satisfied with course level and contents. The evaluation of participants was evidenced by the results of the pre- and post-course tests: participants have made remarkable progress in improving their knowledge and skills during the course.

Towards our common goal in support of achieving MDGs , the participants are expected to contribute in constructing profiles of the poor that can help their Government and donors identify potential target areas by region, employment , education and gender, among others.