Upgrading the Statistical System of Turkey Programme is a multi-phase and multi-year project financed by the EU. The Programme gave sup-port Turkey’s efforts to harmonize with EU Acquis Communautaire on statistics.
The USST Programme consisted of three consecutive phases with a total budget of 23,6 million €. Turk-Stat has implemented the third Phase of the programme since July 2011.
After a successful implementation period of 41 months, the Pro-gramme has finally been completed by 27 December 2014.
Before the official ending, a Closing Conference was organized on 4th December 2014 in Ankara with the participation of all programme partners, stakeholder institutions, and representatives of international organizations such as Eurostat, UN-ECE, media representatives and academicians.
In this issue of Statistics at Cross-Roads, we aimed at sharing some of the moments of the Conference with the readers.
Besides briefing about various ac-tivities handled over the last six months; in this issue, Mr. Turgay ALTUN, who is an expert in Turk-Stat International Relations Depart-ment will provide information on his Traineeship term in Eurostat. We wish a pleasant reading time and a happy new year for 2015.
Editorial
January 2015 Issue 4
Statistics at
CrossRoads
Inside this issue:Participation of TurkStat President in CES Bureau
Meet-1 Traineeship in Eurostat 2 IAOS Conference 3 Closing Conference of USST Programme Phase III 4 Quality Manage-ment Seminar in Destatis 6
High Level Seminar in Moldova 6 Visit of Azerbaijan Delegation 7 Participation of TurkStat staff in in-ternational activities
7
The Fourth Meeting of UNECE Bureau of the Conference of European Statisticians (CES) was held in Geneva on 21-22 October 2014. TurkStat was represented by President Mr. Birol AYDEMİR and Head of International Re-lations Department, Ms. Şennur ONUR. Mr. AYDEMİR took part in the meeting as the Vice-Chair to the CES Bureau.
TurkStat President participated in CES Bureau Meeting
Who is who 10 90th Anniversary of National Statistical Office of Mongolia 9 Contact us Phone: +903124100410 E-mail: [email protected]
Eurostat organizes Traineeship Programmes for the staff of statistical offices from Candidate and Potential Candidate Countries. Between 2003-2014, 46 TurkStat staff have benefited from these programmes. We appreciate the ini-tiative of Eurostat for hosting our experts. Mr. Turgay ALTUN has been one of the trainees in 2014. The topic of his Traineeship Programme was Study Assessment Reports, Measurement of Compliance with the Acquis and the Statistical Requirement Compendium.
Traineeship in Eurostat — Impressions of a Turkish Trainee
I worked as a trainee at the Unit A3 – Statistical Cooperation. There were three teams under the Unit: “Enlargement Team”, “European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) Team” and “Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific/Asia and Latin America (ACP/ ALA) Team”. I, at Eurostat, worked for both Enlargement and ENP Team dealing mostly with contribution to the preparation of a handbook of good practices of Light Peer Review/ Adapted Global Assessment (LPR/ AGA) countries including Turkey, preparation of Statistical Require-ments Compendium, coordination works on Statistical Management In-formation System (SMIS+) and updat-ing of LPR/AGA questionnaires.
Page 2 Statistics at CrossRoads
Mr. Altun, working as an Expert in TurkStat International Relations Department since 2006, gave information about being a trainee in Eurostat.
What was the context of my job in Eurostat?
One of the most advantageous aspects of a traineeship at Eurostat is the oppor-tunity to participate trainings; even you work as a trainee. During my traineeship period, I attended three training courses: “Survey Methodology for Non-Methodologists”, “What We Talk about When We Talk about Statistics: A Course for Non-Statisticians” and “Quality Management Frameworks”. In particular, first two courses contributed a lot for me as a non-statistician to learn fundamental aspects of statistics.
Traineeship in Eurostat — Impressions of a Turkish Trainee
(cont’d)
Page 3 Issue 4
Since I am working in the Intertional Relations Department of a na-tional statistical institute (NSI), I was familiar with the task I worked at Eu-rostat. Nevertheless, working at Euro-stat gave me an overview of countries Eurostat works with, how Eurostat carries out its tasks and coordinates the countries, even if it lasted for 5 months.
The acquisitions of the Traineeship
When you work for an NSI, you have the opportunity to see only your country, but working at Eurostat gives you the chance both to observe the other countries and to see the “behind the scenes” at Eurostat. Furthermore, even if the name of the programme is 'traineeship', I can definitely say that is more than a traineeship, but as a “secondment for 5 months”, because your tasks carried out at Eurostat, the treatment of your colleagues and hierarchy are not very different from a staff there. Finally, sharing information and experience with the colleagues from the units not only about work-related things but also on cultural issues and living in a different country for a 5 months' time added a lot to my personal development. Working in an international environment was of utmost importance to improve my inter-cultural skills. These kinds of dialogues obviously made considerable contribution to my language skills.
TurkStat in IAOS Conference in Vietnam
The International Association for Official Statistics (IAOS) Conference on Official Statistics was held in Da Nang, Vietnam from 8 to 10 October 2014. Mr. Alper GÜCÜMENGİL who is acting as head of Interna-tional Project Management Group, participated in the Conference with his article titled“How to Build Capacity in Statistics?”
The theme of IAOS 2014 was “Meeting the demands of a changing world”. However, in the conference, a broad range of subjects were covered such as; us-ing new data sources, big data, innovative forms of data sharing etc.
Upgrading the Statistical System of Turkey (USST) Programme Phase III, started in July 2011, has finally come to an end. A final visibility event, namely a “Closing Conference” was real-ized on 4th December 2014, to appraise and celebrate the successful term of the USST Pro-gramme.
The Conference was held in Ankara with the participation of 250 participants from national and international stakeholders, academic environment, media and NGOs.
During the Conference, Mr. Cevdet YILMAZ, Minister of Development, Mr. Birol AYDEMİR, President of TurkStat, Mr. Bela SZOMBATI, Charge D'affaires of EU Delegation to Turkey , Ms. Emine DÖĞER, Acting President of Central Finance and Contracts Unit, Mr. Ahmet YÜCEL, Deputy Undersecretary of Ministry of EU Affairs made the opening speeches.
Mr. Enver TAŞTI, Vice President of TurkStat, made a presentation about the USST Pro-gramme with its content and achievements. Mr. Ullrich EICHLER, the Management Advisor from GOPA Consultants, briefly presented the outcomes of the project and emphasized on the sustainability of these results.
Representatives of EU Delegation, UNECE and Eurostat gave speeches on the importance of statistics and also TurkStat’s contribution in international cooperation activities.
The technical outputs of the USST Programme Phase III were presented to the audience by the Head of Departments of TurkStat. They gave information about the progress in the re-lated statistical areas. Additionally, the representatives of Ministry of Finance, Central Bank of Republic of Turkey, Ministry of Health and Ministry of Environment and Urbanization pre-sented the statistical studies in their institutions.
Sayfa 4 Statistics at CrossRoads
Closing Conference of USST Programme Phase III
Closing Conference of USST Programme Phase III
Sayfa 5 Issue 4
Quality Management Seminar in Destatis
Page 6Federal Statistical Office of Germany organized a seminar titled as “Quality Management in Official Statistics” on 3-13 November 2014. It had been an ad-hoc seminar designed for TurkStat. A total of 18 staff from different departments participated in the seminar where they had the chance to gather information on very important topics such as; EFQM model in statistics, human resources management, staff satisfaction surveys, User sat-isfaction surveys, Reputation analysis, and data quality assurance mechanisms.
TurkStat was represented in High Level Seminar in Moldova
Two experts from Turkish Statistical Institute(TurkStat) participated in the High Level Seminar for the Eastern European, Caucasus and Central Asian (EECCA) Countries on “Quality in Statistics: How to Manage Change” held on September 16-18, 2014 in Chişinău, Moldova with the invitation of Eu-rostat.
Mr. Bülent YILMAZ, Head of Official Statistics and Administrative Registers Group, made a presentation on “Official Statistics Programme and Common Portal”.
Mr. Turgay ALTUN, Expert in the International Rela-tions Department, made a presentation on the "Handbook on the Good Practices form the Adapted Global Assessments (AGAs) and Light Peer Reviews (LPRs)".
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Visit of Azerbaijan Delegation
TurkStat welcomed a high level delegation from State Statistical Committee of the Re-public of Azerbaijan. The visit was conducted in the context of a recent project by SES-RIC on Integration of Tobacco Questions for Surveys into ongoing national surveys in Or-ganization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) Member States. (SESRIC stands for Statistical, Economic and Social Research and Training Centre for Islamic Countries)
The Azerbaijani Delegation consisting of Mr. Hamit BAGHİROV, First Deputy Chairman and Mr. Yashar Pasha, Head of Population Living Standards and Household Budget Survey Statistics Department, participated in meetings with the staff of TurkStat Social Sectors Statistics Department. Additionally, they were welcomed by TurkStat President Mr. Birol AYDEMİR.
During the last six months, 298 TurkStat staff participated in 137 international activities, which is composed of 15 study visits, 63 meetings and workshops, 52 seminars, training courses and conferences and 7 traineeship programmes. The meetings, workshops and seminars took place mostly in Eurostat on almost every subject of official statistics. The study visits were hosted by the statistical offices of several EU countries. We appreciate and send our gratitude to our partner statistical offices in Europe, especially Federal Sta-tistical Office of Germany, Statistics Denmark, Statistics Austria and StaSta-tistical office of Czech Republic, which organized ad-hoc courses and study visits for TurkStat and wel-comed our staff through this period.
Additionally, 13 TurkStat staff were assigned to consultancy services in Statistical Offices of Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Jordan, Kuwait, Azerbaijan, Uganda and Albania.
in this period, the consultancy services provided by TurkStat were on ICT (databases and data warehouse), tourism statistics, information society and innovation statistics, seasonal adjustment, animal production, business registers and business statistics.
Sayfa 8 Statistics at CrossRoads
Policy Group on Statistical Cooperation Meeting in Antalya
TurkStat hosted “Policy Group on Statistical Cooperation (PGSC)” meeting on 30-31 Octo-ber 2014 in Antalya. Policy Group, established by Eurostat, is consisted of the Presidents and Heads of International Relations Departments of Statistical Offices of candidate and potential candidate countries to EU. PGSC aims at monitoring the implementation and results of technical assistance and cooperation programmes as well as compliance of sta-tistical systems of these countries’ to EU Acquis.
PGSC meetings are organized once a year in one of the attendant countries. This was the second time for TurkStat to host a PGSC meeting. First was in 2008 in İstanbul.
The meeting was realized under the chairmanship of Mr. Pieter EVERAERS, Director of Eu-rostat Unit A -Cooperation in ESS, International Cooperation and Resources. Turkey was represented by TurkStat President Mr. Birol AYDEMİR, Vice President Mr. Enver TAŞTI, Head of International Relations Department Ms. Şennur ONUR and Head of International Project Management Group Mr. Alper GÜCÜMENGİL.
National Statistical Office of Mongolia has suc-cessfully organized a celebration event on the occasion of 90th Anniversary of Establishment of the Modern National Statistics System in Mongo-lia and the Seminar on Global Assessments to Implement the Quality Frameworks in Statistics on 02-03 October, 2014, in Ulaanbaatar.
On behalf of TurkStat, Mr. Rıdvan YAKA, Vice President of TurkStat, attended the Seminar and the ceremonies to underline that our collabora-tive efforts and partnership have been remarka-bly valuable for two sides.
90th Anniversary of the Establishment of Modern National Statistical
System in Mongolia
Antalya is one of the most beautiful cities of Turkey. Taking the advantage of sunny weather in October, a boat tour was organized for the participants of PGSC Meeting .
Sayfa 9 Issue 4
Who is Who?
International Project Management Group
International Cooperation and EU Coordination Group
Metin EROL Expert +903124189761/168 [email protected]
Ebru ÇÖKMEZ Expert +903124189761/168 [email protected]
Osman ORHANLI Expert +903124189761/169 [email protected]
Betül TAŞDEMİR Expert +903124189761/169 [email protected]
Gözde ÖZTELLİ Expert +903124189761/163 [email protected]
Çağatay IŞILAK Expert +903124189761/163 [email protected] Jale YELMEN Statistician +903124189761/169 [email protected] Derya KOÇ Statistician +903124189761/163 [email protected] Nuray KIZILBAYRAK Secretary +903124189761/168 [email protected]
Berna BAŞARAN Expert +903124189761/167 [email protected]
Nilgün ÇELEBİOĞLU Expert +903124189761/167 [email protected]
Turgay ALTUN Expert +903124189761/166 [email protected]
Neslihan ÖNCÜL Expert +903124189761/166 [email protected]
Şükrü ÇALLI Expert +903124189761/167 [email protected]
Serap GÖZEL Engineer +903124189761/167 [email protected]
Halime ÖNDER Economist +903124189761/166 [email protected]
Deniz SAÇILIK Secretary +903124189761/166 [email protected]
Enver TAŞTI Vice President
Tel: +90 312 4100119 [email protected]
Şennur ONUR
Head of International Relations De-partment
Tel: +90 312 4189761/125 [email protected] Alper GÜCÜMENGİL
Head of International Project Management Group
Tel: +90 312 4189761/164 [email protected]
Gürdal GEDİK
Head of International Relations and EU Coordination Group Tel: +90 312 4189761/165 [email protected] TURKISH STATISTICAL INSTITUTE Devlet Mah. Necatibey cad. No:114 06650 Çankaya/Ankara TURKEY Phone: +90 312-410 0410 Fax:+90 312-4253387 www.tuik.gov.tr
