SESRIC’s Meeting with the Qatar Statistics Authority
Date: 19-20 May 2010
Venue: Doha - Qatar

A SESRIC delegation composed of Eng. Huseyin Hakan Eryetli, Director of IT and Publication Department and Mr. Mehmet Fatih Serenli, Director of Training and Technical Cooperation Department was received by H.E. Sheikh Hamad bin Jabor bin Jassim Al Thani, President of the QSA, and high level officials from the Qatar Statistics Authority (QSA) in Doha, Qatar on 19 May 2010.

H.E. Sheikh Hamad bin Jabor bin Jassim Al Thani, President of the QSA, kindly accepted the SESRIC delegation. Dr. Hassan Ibrahim Al Mohannadi, Director of Permanent Population Community, Khalid Mohammed Al-Khulaifi, Director of Human Resources, Dr. Ahmad Hussein, Statistics Advisor, were also present during the meeting.

After the welcome speech of the President of the QSA, the SESRIC delegation was briefed on various statistical activities conducted by the QSA, in particular the role of QSA in the forthcoming ISI and Khawarizmi Conferences. The SESRIC delegation was further informed about the National Strategy for the Development of Statistics in the State of Qatar, prepared by the QSA in conformity with PARIS21 NSDS guidelines and the UN Fundamental Principles of Official Statistics for the purpose of strengthening statistical capacity across the entire Qatari national statistical system.
Following the briefing on training and technical cooperation activities of SESRIC on statistical capacity building by Mr. Serenli, Mr. Eryetli explained SESRIC’s various statistical activities and gave some insight about the statistical tools recently developed. The two parties conferred on the possibility of developing a tailored statistical capacity building programme for the statisticians in Qatar, in cooperation with other relevant stakeholders, including international organisations and universities.

A separate meeting was organised on May 20, 2010 where Mr. Eryetli presented the statistical databases and tools developed by SESRIC during the last 4 years. This special meeting was attended by over 20 QSA officials including consultants, department directors and technical staff. After a short introduction of BASEIND, SESRIC’s statistical database, Mr. Eryetli focused on SESRIC’s statistical data visualization tool, namely the SESRIC Motion Chart (SMC) Generator. The project titled “OIC Member Countries in Figures” was also demonstrated online.

After the meeting, Mr. Mansoor Ahmed Al Malki., Director of IT at the QSA, briefed the delegation on QSA’s recently developed GIS system. A demonstration has been presented by Mr. Al Malki to the SESRIC delegation on how to create online thematic geographic maps of Qatar by using this software. This demonstrated capacity of the GIS has been noted by the SESRIC delegation as it may have the potential of initiating technical cooperation among OIC Member Countries. Mr. Al Malki also proposed that a system integration of the statistics database of the QSA and the BASEIND database of SESRIC should be considered as the next step towards international statistical data dissemination and it was emphasized that this could easily be implemented via web service technologies.