SESRIC participated in the special session on “Capacity development - Coordination, harmonisation and innovative approaches to capacity building from a partner and a donor perspective” as one of the panelists on 22 October 2018 in Dubai, UAE. The panel was organised under the main theme “New approaches to capacity development for better data: Supporting broad data ecosystems in countries” allocated within the programme of United Nations World Data Forum 2018.

Participants from national statistical offices, international organisations and other relevant stakeholders – those providing statistical capacity development and courses and those benefiting from capacity development measures –discussed their ways and approaches to capacity development. These include peer-to-peer learning, statistics courses in the institutions, international statistical outreach programmes for users and producers of official statistics, masters of official statistics, integration of capacity building into strategies and plans, donor coordination among others. The session also focused on measuring capacity building activities in terms of outcomes and benefits from it for the participating countries/organisations and how to better harmonise and coordinate capacity development in different contexts and among different donors.

The UN World Data Forum 2018 was hosted by Federal Competitiveness and Statistics Authority (FCSA) of United Arab Emirates from 22 to 24 October 2018, with support from the Statistics Division of the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, under the guidance of the United Nations Statistical Commission and the High-level Group for Partnership, Coordination and Capacity-Building for Statistics for the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

For more information on the UN World Data Forum 2018, please visit: https://undataforum.org