The call for nominations for the 2015 United Nations Public Service Awards (UNPSA) closed on 19 November after being extended from the original 31 October deadline. The UNPSA Team has now started the initial pre-screening of submissions to determine which initiatives meet the basic criteria for each category of the 2015 UNPSA.

The categories for the current cycle are i) Improving the Delivery of Public Services, ii) Fostering Participation in Policy-Making Decisions through Innovative Mechanisms, iii) Promoting whole-of-Government Approaches in the Information Age, and iv) Promoting Gender Responsive Delivery of Public Services.

Following the completion of the screening process, initiatives will be taken to the next rounds of evaluation which include substantive reviews with support of the staff of UN DESA’s Division for Public Administration and Development Management (DPADM) for the first three categories. For the last category, Gender Responsive Delivery of Public Services, DPADM collaborates with UN Women colleagues who will support with the reviews in that category.

The overall process of substantively evaluating UNPSA initiatives is estimated to take up to five months. Starting in December 2014, after the pre-screening process has been completed, the initiatives will be processed in two different rounds by DPADM and UN Women before being handed over to the United Nations Committee of Experts on Public Administration (CEPA) for final review. CEPA will then endorse and decide on the final winners for the 2015 UNPSA.

As the pre-screening starts, initial numbers indicate that the UNPSA Programme has received 846 nominations coming from all the five regions of the world and in all categories. The majority of the nominations were received in English. Submissions are also distributed across all four UNPSA categories, with Category 1 (Improving the Delivery of Public Service) being the dominant category. Numerous countries which were underrepresented last year are participating in the 2015 UNPSA Programme.

For more information: UN Public Service Awards

UN DESA’s Division for Social Policy and Development (DSPD), in collaboration with UN Habitat, will hold an Expert Group Meeting and Capacity-building Workshop on The Role of Cooperatives in Sustainable Development: Contributions, Challenges and Strategies on 8–10 December in Nairobi, Kenya.

The meeting will provide the opportunity for participants to exchange ideas on how cooperatives can help to build sustainable societies and how lessons learned in this regard can benefit the implementation process of the post-2015 development.

The expert analysis generated by the meeting will become part of the report of the United Nations Secretary-General in 2015, which will discuss the role and potential of cooperatives in achieving social, economic, and environmental development. The meeting will also serve as a capacity-building exercise for participating cooperative leaders and trainers in Africa.

For more information:

UN DESA’s Division for Social Policy and Development (DSPD)

UN DESA’s Statistics Division and UN Women in collaboration with the Kitakyushu Forum on Asian Women, are organizing a Midterm Review Technical Meeting of the Evidence and Data for Gender Equality (EDGE) initiative on 3-5 December at Kitakyushu, Japan.

The meeting will bring together national statisticians, regional commissions and partner agencies to take stock of progress made by the EDGE initiative on measuring individual level asset ownership and entrepreneurship from a gender perspective.

The key objectives of the meeting are to promote the integration of a gender perspective into national statistical systems with the aim of improving the availability and quality of gender statistics, including statistics on the “emerging issues” of asset ownership and entrepreneurship; update participants on the progress made by the EDGE initiative to advance methodological development on measuring asset ownership and entrepreneurship from a gender perspective; and receive feedback from national statisticians on the feasibility of implementing the recommendation(s) made by the EDGE Methodological Survey Experiment with regards to whom in the household should be interviewed about the ownership, control and valuation of assets at the individual level.

The event further seeks to receive feedback from national statisticians on the applicability and feasibility of the methodology proposed under the EDGE project to measure entrepreneurship from a gender perspective; and to ensure that country implementation plans are in place for piloting data collection on asset ownership and control under the EDGE initiative during 2015.

For more information:

UN DESA’s Statistics Division