The countries participating in the ninth meeting of the Statistical Conference of the Americas of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), held in Mexico, urged governments of the region on Thursday to bolster their commitment to sustainability and to the strengthening of national statistics systems, with a view to achieving the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

At the regional gathering, which concluded yesterday in the city of Aguascalientes, countries called on governments to establish legal frameworks that provide national statistics offices with professional independence, consolidate their leading role in official statistics, and guarantee the necessary human, technological and financial resources.

The meeting – organized by the government of Mexico, through the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI), and ECLAC – was inaugurated on Tuesday 14 November by Alicia Bárcena, ECLAC’s Executive Secretary; Julio Santaella, President of INEGI; and Mario Palma, Vice President of INEGI, in his capacity as President of the Executive Committee of the Statistical Conference of the Americas.

In the meeting’s resolutions, approved by the 39 participating delegations, countries highlighted the importance of the Statistical Conference of the Americas (SCA) as the suitable intergovernmental body to produce a regional indicator framework for monitoring the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in Latin America and the Caribbean and to channel cooperation activities for strengthening the statistical capacities of the region’s countries, with a view to statistical follow-up of the 2030 Agenda.

The participants expressed gratitude for the work done by the member countries of the Inter-agency and Expert Group on SDG Indicators and the High-level Group for Partnership, Coordination and Capacity-Building for statistics for the 2030 Agenda, and urged them to continue representing the region in the global process to determine and apply the indicator framework for the 2030 Agenda’s Goals and targets and the Cape Town Global Action Plan for Sustainable Development Data.

Furthermore, the countries exhorted the Statistical Coordination Group for the 2030 Agenda to continue organizing actions with the Ad Hoc Working Group charged with drafting a proposal of indicators for regional follow-up of the Montevideo Consensus established in the second meeting of the Regional Conference on Population and Development in Latin America and the Caribbean.

They also encouraged the Conference’s Member States to promote concrete actions at a national level to establish coordination mechanisms and technical procedures related to the integrated handling of statistical and geospatial information, so that the requirements for territorial disaggregation of the 2030 Agenda may be met, along with those of future population and housing censuses, among other statistical operations.

At the meeting, ECLAC presented countries with a Proposal on a Regional Framework of Indicators for Monitoring the SDGs in Latin America and the Caribbean that participating countries received with interest. The document seeks to contribute to stimulating and sustaining the intergovernmental dialogue within the SCA in the coming months, to achieve a regional consensus.

At the same time, country delegates examined and approved the proposal for the 2018-2019 program of activities of the ECLAC Conference’s Working Groups.

They also agreed that the SCA’s Executive Committee in that biennium will be made up of Chile in the Presidency, along with Canada, Costa Rica, Italy, Jamaica, Mexico and Peru.

The Statistical Conference of the Americas is a subsidiary body of ECLAC with the main objectives of promoting the development and improvement of national statistics and their international comparability, as well as international, regional and bilateral cooperation among national offices and international and regional agencies.