The second Steering Committee Meeting of the EU funded project "ParStat"  was held

On the 30th of July 2020, the second Steering Committee Meeting of the EU funded project “Technical Assistance to Support the National Bureau of Statistics of the Republic of Moldova” (ParStat project) was held. In the context of the Covid-19 pandemic circumstances it took place online.

The Steering Committee members included representatives from the National Bureau of Statistics of the Republic of Moldova (NBS), the State Chancellery, the Ministry of Finance, the Delegation of the European Union to Moldova and representatives from the Italian National Institute of Statistics (Istat), the National Institute of Statistics of Poland (GUS) and the National Institute of Statistics of Denmark. Overall, 26 representatives took part to the event, both as official members of the Steering Committee and as observers.

All the participants pointed out the global issues generated by Covid-19 pandemic and their endeavours in the implementation of the ParStat project, namely: the constraints to provide technical assistance from international experts, limitations to conduct field work activities.  This unexpected situation caused a slowdown in project activities, although most of them have continued to be implemented with frequent online interactions between the NBS staff and project experts.

During the meeting, NBS representatives proposed to focus project targets on specific priority areas and to maintain the overall implementation approach as output oriented, in order to ensure the achievement of concrete results. NBS encouraged the Consortium partners to be involved as much as possible in the implementation of the project through specific expertise on concrete statistical topics and domains and sharing of best practices, especially in the context of the new pandemic situation.

Parstat experts reiterated their willingness and availability to adapt to the online remote work modality and to continue the implementation of the project in a successful way.

On the other hand, the Partners from the project consortium reassured that the pandemic general context did not diminish the potential of the project; on the contrary, the present situation was represented as an opportunity for the NBS to strengthen its capacities in adapting to such an exceptional situation and to develop further new modalities of technical assistance for honing its skills and capacities.

Experts from the National Bureau of Statistics and from the Parstat Project summarised the main results/outputs and deliverables of the project achieved in the second semester and the activities indicatively planned for the next six months, including training activities.