14 August 2014: The 13th meeting of the Executive Committee of the Statistical Conference of the Americas (SCA), a subsidiary body of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), assessed progress made by the SCA’s 14 working groups and two task forces on, inter alia, follow-up on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), institutional strengthening, household surveys, and censuses and labor market indicators. A seminar addressed strategies to take advantage of administrative records for statistical purposes.

The Executive Committee, which supports the SCA in carrying out its mandates and activities that aim to stimulate progress in the region’s statistical policies and activities, met from 12-14 August 2014, in Santiago, Chile, with the participation of representatives from national statistics institutes and international organizations. ECLAC Executive Secretary Alicia Bárcena called for countries to strengthen their statistical institutions to contribute to the global debate on the post-2015 development agenda with more and better information on inequality gaps. She said the post-2015 agenda constitutes a “unique opportunity” to design a monitoring framework based on robust statistics and indicators that can demonstrate progress made, with ECLAC’s subsidiary bodies, such as the SCA, serving as the intergovernmental forums for reviewing and reporting. She said reliable and up-to-date data is needed to tackle gaps between Latin America and the Caribbean and other regions in such areas as access to finance, trade and technology. Pascual Gerstenfeld, Director, ECLAC Statistics Division, encouraged participants to strengthen cooperation mechanisms like the SCA.

The Executive Committee agreed to: develop, every two years, a biennial programme of regional and international cooperation activities on statistical matters; and follow-up on implementation of agreements reached and tasks entrusted to it. It also, inter alia: urged working groups to seek cooperation modalities and synergies to optimize resource use and achieve common goals; and called for designating focal points to expedite and improve communication and discussions within groups.

In addition, the Committee agreed on issues related to: harmonization of poverty statistics; monitoring progress towards achieving the MDGs, the post-2015 development agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs); increasing country efforts to generate the information necessary to produce MDG indicators using international standards and regional and national benchmarks; the creation of a website for the Working Group on Gender Statistics to improve the exchange and dissemination of information; and quantification of South-South cooperation.

The Executive Committee also: reiterated the need for national statistical offices to help produce national reports on progress towards achieving the MDGs, and to participate in preparing the post-2015 development agenda monitoring framework; called for securing financial resources to undertake biennial work programme activities; and recognized the importance of guidelines relating to measuring types of work, and labor force employment and underemployment.

On environmental statistics, the Executive Committee: welcomed the initiative to hold an online course on nomenclature; supported efforts regarding economic valuation of unpaid work; called for increased efforts to produce children- and youth-related indicators; and participate in the assessment of the status of crime and criminal justice statistics.

The Executive Committee will prepare, with the Secretariat, a draft strategic plan for presentation at the 14 meeting of the Executive Committee. [ECLAC Press Release] [Agreements of the Executive Committee of the SCA of ECLAC at its 13th Meeting]