The United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP), in collaboration with the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA), organized the Asia-Pacific Conference: Taking Collective Action to Accelerate Transformation of Official Statistics for Agenda 2030 in Bangkok from 27 to 28 March 2017. The Conference brought together a broad range of national, regional and global stakeholder institutions to engender reflections and bring forward recommendations on how collective efforts to enhance data and statistics can best support national SDG implementation in Asia-Pacific member States.
The recommendations was map out concrete steps for implementing a framework of action so that “…by 2030, national statistical systems are enabled and empowered to lead development of and to deliver innovative, trusted and timely products and services for urgently needed and evolving statistical requirements of Agenda 2030.” This shared vision and the supporting collective actions, endorsed by the 5th session of the ESCAP Committee on Statistics in December 2016, serves as a guide for the Asia-Pacific statistical community in identifying priorities for statistical capacity enhancement in the region and aids the process of identifying regional resources and mechanisms for undertaking capacity building collectively, at the national level.
The outcomes of the conference were directly fed into deliberations involving governments, civil society, the private sector and other stakeholders on strengthening the means of implementation of the 2030 Agenda at the fourth session of the Asia-Pacific Forum on Sustainable Development on 29-31 March 2017. Accelerating the transformation of official statistics to advance implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals requires complementary, collaborative and cooperative partnership initiatives, based on a common understanding of needs of countries. The conference sought to integrate this strategy into the Asia-Pacific Roadmap for SDG Implementation.