Yaounde — About 70 stakeholders comprising executives and planning experts, statistics executives and experts, members of the civil society and representatives from the private sector will converge on the La Falaise Hotel in Yaounde on 5 and 6 November 2018 to review and validate two ECA studies on accountability and statistics in development planning in Cameroon.

The workshop is an integral part of the United Nation's Development Account's Tenth Tranche project on strengthening the capacity of African national planning institutions to integrate accountability frameworks and evidence-based policies in their development planning processes and to strengthen the capacity of African national statistics institutions to collect, compile and produce the data necessary to inform and support development planning.

The project is being rolled out in five African countries since 2016 by Capacity Development Division of the UN Economic Commission for Africa (ECA): Benin, Cameroon, Egypt, Kenya and Zambia.

So far two case studies have been developed for Cameroon:

 One of them assesses the status and progress of its national planning process and examines the existing evaluation and monitoring frameworks to gauge entry points for strengthening Cameroon's accountability and evidence-based policymaking mechanisms

 The other assesses Cameroon's national statistical institution's ability to collect, compile, produce and use the data necessary for strengthening accountability in development planning

The main objective of this national workshop is to validate and showcase the findings of the Case Studies on mainstreaming accountability in development planning in Cameroon to all the stakeholders.

More specifically, this workshop aims to:

 Acquire a common understanding of the different stages of the case studies including adopted methodologies;

 Decide on the content of the final reports in accordance with the objectives of the Development Account project;

 Obtain technical input from Cameroon's planning and statistics experts to make necessary amendments to the final case study reports.

During the workshop, the first edition of an evidence-based profile on the state of Cameroon's Structural Transformation, Employment, Production and Society for the year 2018, christened STEPS Profile, will be launched.

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