BelizeInfo – Everything You Need to Know About Belize
Mark Antrobus
The Ministry of Human Development this morning formally launched what it calls a “one-stop shop” for everything you need to know about Belize. Called BelizeInfo, it comes out of the I.D.B. – funded Community Action for Public Safety (CAPS) project started five years ago. With over sixty-five thousand data values ranging from measurement of homicides to economic and financial data, it is intended to become a handy tool for analysis of our developing nation. Social planner with the Ministry, Mark Antrobus explains.
Mark Antrobus, Social Planner, Ministry of Human Development
“We didn’t start from scratch; we’ve had these…we have a lot of these around the country. But what we never had was a systematic way to put it all together to analyze data from different sectors. So if you look at crime and security, it isn’t just the number of crimes that we have that is going to be able to reduce the crime rate. You need look at education; you need to look at health, social context and so it is being able to put all this data in one place, bring it all together and enhance the analysis that we have been able to do in the past and create better results.”
Reporter
“When you speak about having data from different sources, I would say, and about different topics, how do you get other ministries—I don’t know if this is spread across the government—but to include FIU speaking of tourism data; that sort of thing?”
Mark Antrobus
“We took a decision very early in the project that we weren’t going to focus just on crime and just this data. We wanted to logistically a national policy monitoring tool for the country and for government. And so you are right; it is not just government data that we have; it is not just ministries. It is anyone that producers data in the country that we can upload into the system. And so you are right; that’s still a challenge getting data from a number of sources. We got data over the last two years in paper format, in PDF format, in excel format and so putting all of that into one system is a challenge. It is getting much better, but there is still a long way to go.”
