The First Meeting of the Heads of National Statistical Offices of ECO Member States was held on 28-29 January, 2008 in Tehran, Islamic Republic of Iran. The meeting was attended by the Heads of National Statistical Offices/Representatives of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, Republic of Azerbaijan, Islamic Republic of Iran (host), Republic of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyz Republic, Islamic Republic of Pakistan, Republic of Tajikistan and Republic of Turkey. The representatives of UNESCAP, UNECE, IDB and SESRTCIC also attended the meeting.
Heads of delegations exchanged their views and experiences on cooperation in the statistics area of their respective countries, challenges, potentials, prospects and proposals in this regard. The meeting further discussed progress made in implementation of current activities in the field of statistics including Annual Economic Report, ECO's Key Indicators, Statistical Bulletins and the dissemination of economic news/information on the ECO website.
The meeting considered and adopted the ECO Framework of Cooperation in Statistics and Plan of Action. The plan of action and framework envisages among the most important objectives of regional cooperation in statistics, support for ECO’s regional initiatives, planning and policy-making through the provision of comparable and timely statistics; harmonization of classifications, concepts, definitions, and measurements; adoption of international best practices; and promotion improvements in the official statistics. The progress of implementation of the Framework shall be reviewed once a year. The meeting also agreed on the proposal of Kazakhstan to prepare a business plan for implementation of ECO Framework of Cooperation and Plan of Action on Statistics.
The delegates discussed capacity-building activities including training programmes, utilizing technical and financial support from relevant international agencies/donors. The Secretariat informed the meeting that in cooperation with international organizations it was working on training programmes for statisticians from member states for the next few years. The meeting welcomed the proposal of Iran's delegation to organize several workshops/seminars for statisticians from member states in different fields of statistics.
The meeting noted several proposals of member states including establishment of a regional centre or a separate statistical unit in ECO Secretariat as a possible options in order to improve cooperation in the field of statistics. It was agreed that based on the proposals of member states, the Secretariat will prepare comprehensive proposal for discussion in the next meeting.
Meanwhile, a network of ECO national statistical offices (NSOs) as an institutional mechanism will be established. In this network, specific areas will be coordinated by different member states. In this regard, relevant offices will be established by respective member states for which proposals would be sent to the Secretariat by member states. The Secretariat will prepare a consolidated proposal for approval by the CPR .
Representative of the Statistical, Economic and Social Research and Training Centre for Islamic Countries (SESRTCIC) informed the meeting that they were organizing training programmes based on the needs of member states and in this connection the representative distributed a Questionnaire among the remaining participants to get information about their training needs. The representative of IDB informed the participants about the Statistical Capacity building programmes which will be launched soon and invited ECO member states to benefit from this programme based on their specific needs. The Director of UNESCAP Statistical Division briefed the meeting on the technical cooperation projects that UNESCAP is currently implementing in Asia and the Pacific region in collaboration with other regional and international organizations and to which ECO member states are invited to participate and benefit. The main areas include Informal sector statistics, Disability statistics, Micro-data documentation and dissemination, MDG indicators, use of IT tools for the Population Census, and National Strategies for Development of Statistics. UNESCAP also requested the ECO member states to submit to SIAP their statistical training needs in order to continue benefit of SIAP training activities.The representative of UNECE spoke on the main fields in which UNECE was rendering assistance for the Statistical Capacity building in the Central Asian countries, including the 2010 Round of Population and Housing Censuses, measuring Non-observed Economy, International Migration Flows, Dissemination activities of Statistical information to different user groups of the society, gender issues and MDGs.
The meeting adopted Tehran Communiqué of the First Meeting of ECO Heads of National Statistical Offices.
Kazakhstan's delegation offered to host the Second Meeting of the Heads of ECO National Statistical Offices and the meeting decided to hold it in Astana in June 2009.
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