Addis Ababa — The Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), in collaboration with the Africa Union Commission (AUC) and the African Development bank (AfDB) will organize the inaugural meeting of the Joint Session of the Committee of Director Generals of the National Statistics Offices (CoDG) and the Statistical Commission for Africa (StatCom-Africa), from 8-12 December, 2014, in Tunis, Tunisia.

Themed, "Strengthening the production of agricultural statistics in Africa for better monitoring and evaluation of CAADP,the Joint Session will bring together Director Generals of National Statistics Office of African Countries, the Heads of departments of statistical units of the Regional Economic Communities (RECs), Schools and Institute of statistics, AFRISTAT and other Development Partners, to discuss policy progress of statistics and statistical activities in Africa.

The main objectives of the meeting include:

(i) to discuss the challenges related to the production of agricultural statistics in Africa;

(ii) to review the implementation of the African Charter on Statistics and SHaSA as well as the operationalization of the African Union Institute for Statistics and the Pan-African Statistical Training Centre; and

(iii) to contribute to the formulation of indicateurs of Post 2015 African Development Agenda.

In parallel with the Joint Session will be the inaugural meeting of the United Nations Global Geospatial Information Management for Africa (UN-GGIM: Africa), themed, Making Statistics

and Maps work UN-GGIM:Africa is proposed to be a regional UN-GGIM subset to coordinate African GGIM activities. UN-GGIM:Africa will propose formal establishment of the body to

replace CODIST-Geo and decide upon the main challenges and issues pertaining to geospatial information in Africa. Additionally, it will examine the global movement of integrating geospatial

technology into national statistical offices.