A workshop on “MDG Monitoring: to 2015 and beyond” will be arranged in Bangkok, Thailand, on 9-13 July

DESA’s Statistics Division is organizing the workshop in collaboration with the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific.

The event will bring together representatives from national statistical offices, line ministries and international agencies to review recommendations for calculating MDG indicators, reporting MDG data and establishing strategies for dealing with data discrepancies between national and international MDG figures, particularly for hunger, child, maternal and reproductive health indicators.

The workshop will also be an opportunity to review lessons learnt from monitoring the MDGs in view of the preparation of the post-2015 development agenda and the related new monitoring framework.

For more information:
DESA’s Statistics Division

An IT training workshop for key participants from the Morocco National Statistics Office (NSO) will take place in New York on 11-18 July

The workshop is organized by DESA’s Statistics Division (UNSD) as part of the UNSD-DFID Project on Improving the Availability, Collation and Dissemination of National Development Indicators.

The training will cover eXtensible Markup Language (XML), eXtensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT) and Statistical Data and Metadata eXchange (SDMX), a cutting edge technology to facilitate data exchange and dissemination. The tools will help the Morocco NSO in automating their processes for producing statistical publications and in sharing data in a more automated, standardized way.

For more information:
DESA’s Statistics Division

An international capacity building workshop entitled “Future Government: A Global Perspective in Connection to Open Government Data and Citizen Engagement” was arranged in Geneva, Switzerland, on 16-17 May

The workshop was arranged by DESA’s Division for Public Administration and Development Management (DPADM), in cooperation with the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), during the 2012 annual follow-up meetings of the World Summit on Information Society (WSIS).

The workshop had around 55 participants including high-level officials including the Acting Minister of the Ministry of State for Administration Development from Egypt, Deputy Minister of the Ministry of Information Communication Technologies from Iran and Commissioner of the Regulation and Communication Body of the Republic of Colombia as well as academia, NGOs, private sector and international organizations including UNDP, Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and regional UN commissions of UN-ESCWA and UN-ECLAC.

Key outcomes of the Workshop are: (i) formation of a voluntary taskforce to contribute to the implementation of the Toolkit for Open Government Data and Citizen Engagement; (ii) detailed recommendations to the DPADM on methodology to benchmark Open Data and Citizen Engagement in the UN E-Government Survey which will be detailed in the Workshop Report; (iii) identification of e-participation in the era of new media as the theme for 2013; (iv) detailed feedback on the Toolkit especially inclusion of Civil Society before opening any government data.

For more information:
DESA’s Division for Public Administration and Development Management (DPADM)