Addis Ababa — The African Centre for Statistics (ACS) of the Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) will organise, on Sunday 13 May, a meeting to discuss how to address data gaps for Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) economic indicators in Africa.
The meeting will be hosted in Addis Ababa, alongside the ECA Conference of African Ministers of Finance, Planning and Economic Development, will discuss how African national statistic systems could be improved to collect, process, and disseminate SDG data to adequately support national development objectives.
According to ECA, there is a global consensus that investment in the generation and gathering of statistics is fundamental to achieving the 2030 Agenda. Therefore, African countries must first be able draw meaningful plans from complete and sound statistical information for their sustainable development, and second be able to benchmark data and see year on year progress in achieving the SDGs.
The participants of Addis-Ababa meeting will also share their practices and experiences with strengthening their statistics, using in statistics in designing their development plans, and with indicators relating to SDGs
The ECA notes that effective measurement of economic progress for each of the 17 SDG goal, would help African countries identify their shortfalls and take the required actions to shape their programmes, policies and achieve these goals.
The UN general assembly adopted the 17 SDGs in September 2016 as a new global agenda. The goals are comprised of 169 targets and the attainment of these targets will be measured through a set of 230 indicators.