The Economic Commission for Africa and the United Nations Statistics Division are jointly organizing the workshop on sound institutional environment, cooperation, dialogue and partnerships for the production and utilization of SDG indicators in Libreville, Gabon, from 3 to 5 July 2017.

The workshop will address the institutional environment for official statistics in support of monitoring progress towards the SDGs, including governance, leadership, coordination mechanisms and tools as well as dialogue and partnership between producers and users of data and statistics. The workshop will help to achieve a common and improved understanding among the participants about institutional, organizational and managerial arrangements that can best sustain the transformation and modernization of official statistics in order to address emerging user needs for high-quality and internationally comparable data and statistics including for the follow up and review of progress towards the 2030 Agenda.

The workshop will contribute to the development of guidelines, compilations of best practices and other training material at global and regional levels illustrating the impact of institutional, organizational and managerial arrangements on the capacity of national statistical systems to embrace the necessary transformation of official statistics. In particular, the outcome of the workshop and similar events to be organized in other regions will contribute to the update of the UN Handbook on Statistical Organizations with the aim of providing guidance and best practices to achieve a modern, more integrated and coordinated national statistical system.

The target groups for this workshop are senior managers of national statistical agencies and of international and regional organizations, multilateral and bilateral partners and other stakeholders.