Advancing Partnership towards Sustainable Development

It is a pleasure and honor to be here today amongst the region’s esteemed statisticians and dignitaries who have greatly contributed to the field of statistics. I would like to thank the ASEAN Community Statistical System (ACSS) for integrating sustainable development in this year’s theme, “Advancing Partnership towards Sustainable Development.”

With the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development enshrined within the ASEAN Vision 2025, we share a common dream of giving our people a higher quality of life where they are free from hunger, poverty, and conflict, and where they can enjoy their fundamental freedoms and rights.

In this regard, the ASEAN has been taking great strides to achieve the 2030 Agenda, from the eradication of poverty, improving maternal health, and to promoting gender equality. The Philippines is proud to be a part of a community that puts a lot of premium on the well-being of its people.

In the Philippines, we face income inequality, unemployment insecurity, environmental degradation, and increasing disaster risks that have challenged us more and more – each problem seems to grow a limb – as we find solutions to eradicate them. An example of this is the emergence of the “missing middle class,” who lack access to basic services despite increases in income.

However, with the increasing difficulty and complexity of today’s development concerns, the need for collaboration and cooperation among ASEAN member countries has never been clearer and more pressing. We need to move as one and

utilize our individual strengths to find innovative and transformative solutions that will identify linkages and address the root cause of each problem that we face.

This is where the ACSS comes in – as the collectors and generators of data, your work allows for a deeper analysis of the challenges that we face individually and as a regional community. Your work guides key policymakers to make well-informed and evidence-based policy decisions that will help solve economic, environmental, and social issues that we face today – as some of these issues cannot be handled by a single country alone.

We as a community need to exchange notes on best practices in data collection, management, and reporting. We need to be familiar with technologies that can enable us to produce high-quality and timely statistics. There may also be a need to come up with comparable indices for tracking our development goals or progress in achieving our development goals – for example, in the Philippines, we have started using the multidimensional poverty index. This index may be adopted by ASEAN as a whole. We cannot stress enough the importance of developing statistics in Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Philippines – East ASEAN Growth Area (BIMP-EAGA) to monitor to what extent development trickles down to the poorest provinces in our respective countries.

We need to further disaggregate, and increase the frequency, accessibility, and comparability of official statistics. Initiatives such as the Core SDG ASEAN indicators will not only help monitor our regional progress vis a vis the SDGs, but will contribute to identifying development gaps and other issues. However, to make all of these possible, we need to strengthen our statistical agencies by increasing technical and financial support for statistical capacity building.

I would like to commend the ACSS for strengthening the region’s statistical network and prowess. Your tireless effort in providing the ASEAN with timely, relevant and high-quality statistics has not gone unnoticed. I note that the ASEANstats website has been transformed into a researcher-friendly platform where one can easily download data in excel format and create interactive charts. As we realize our vision as a community, know that your work has been an integral part of our journey.

As we have pledged to leave no one behind and no one forsaken, it is my hope that we will continue to work together as part of one community in making the ASEAN Vision 2025 and 2030 Agenda a reality for everyone and all ASEAN countries.