Spanish Cooperation promotes statistics in Africa

Spanish Cooperation’s APIA Programme, managed by the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID) and the FIIAPP, provided the funding for the participation of African countries in the event, the organization of the seminar and the technical assistance to the Praia Group in Cape Verde. The event included activities aimed at supporting statistical systems and data collection and promoting citizen participation.

The National Institute of Statistics of Cape Verde (INECV), in coordination with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), and with the support of Spanish Cooperation and PARIS21, held the inaugural meeting of the Praia Group on Governance Statistics between 17th and 19th June. The mission of this new group is to create a methodology for producing statistics on good governance, peace and security that will support the strategic planning of institutions. The Praia Group was created as a result of an initiative promoted by several African countries that were already working on producing statistics in this field, and is being seen as a group of reference for the development of methods for producing statistics on good governance.

In this first meeting, group members shared their experiences in the field of governance measurement, working groups were created and future activities were defined. These activities will be submitted for approval to the United Nations Statistical Commission on 20th November 2015.

During this first meeting, group members also heard of the importance of including transparency, participation and corruption factors at national, regional and international levels, as well as increasing the participation of developed countries in group meetings with a view to fulfilling the objective of implementing a universal and harmonised methodology for measuring governance, and integrating it in official statistical systems in order to ensure regular data production.

The inaugural event was attended by the Prime Minister of Cape Verde, the Charge d’Affaires at the Spanish Embassy, the UN Representative in the country and the President of the National Institute of Statistics of Cape Verde. As the Prime Minister of Cape Verde mentioned in his speech, ‘if the African continent wants to increase its growth rate and find its own way of achieving the Sustainable Development Goals, it will need to have statistical data that will enable it to build a successful future’.