SESRTCIC CO-ORGANIZES THE OECD WORLD FORUM’S REGIONAL CONFERENCE FOR AFRICA

The SESRTCIC has co-organised the OECD World Forum’s Regional Conference for Africa: Building Capacity to Measure and Forster the Progress of Societies on 14 January 2007 in Kigali, Rwanda. The Conference, which was attended by almost 50 delegates from African countries and international organizations, constitutes one of the regional pre-conferences of the OECD World Forum on Statistics, Knowledge and Policy, to be held in Istanbul on 27-30 June 2007. Dr. Savaş Alpay, Director General, and Ms. Sevgi Reçberoğlu, researcher represented the Centre thereat.

At the first session of the Conference, the participants exchanged views on the ways to improve cooperation between statisticians and the rest of the society in order to better understand the needs of the society and develop more appropriated statistics. The attitudes of policy makers and the media towards the national statistical offices were also discussed.

At the second session, discussions centered on the special needs of African countries to improve their statistical capacity with a view to monitoring the progress made by providing economic, social and environmental data.

At the last session, participants discussed the relevance of the current Millenium Development Goals (MDGs) for African countries and the possible changes of indicators after 2015, the expiration year of the MDGs.