ECLAC -as part of the Working Group on the tracking of the Millennium Development Goals of the Statistical Conference of the Americas of ECLAC (SCA)-, has been working all the cross cutting themes contained in the MDGs, monitoring its indicators for the LAC region, technically assisting its member countries in monitoring and reporting, and developing methodological approaches specific for LAC countries monitoring needs.

This work has been carried out under ECLAC? MDG Statistical Programme, conducted by the Statistics and Economic Projections Division. The main objective of the Programme is to increase the availability of reliable and good quality statistical information for monitoring country progress towards the fulfillment of the MDGs.

The MDG Statistical Programme focuses on four topics:

	Strengthening monitoring capacities
	Statistical development
	Statistical conciliation
	Regional monitoring of MDG indicators

These efforts and action fields are defined by a work strategy that promotes the creation of interinstitutional coordination spaces at different scales, encourages the definition of common methodologies for MDG statistical production and supports capacity building activities for strengthening country MDG monitoring capacities. The Programme aims to create a common strategy for improving MDG statistics, which involves country institutions and international agencies and which can be disaggregated in the following issues:

• Creation and strengthening of interlocution spaces among national institutions, among country institutions and United Nation agencies, and among international organism. In this field the Statistic and Economic Projections Division contributes to the Inter-Agency and Expert Group on Millennium Development Goals Indicators.
• Creation and strengthening of national interinstitutional committees with strong leadership.
• Identification of MDG focal points in countries and agencies.
• Common methodology definitions to tackle different thematic fields involve in MDGs.
• Creation of metadata access and diffusion mechanism.
• Upgrading of technical capacities for the production of statistical information.

Continues regional work on MDG statistics has create an important MDG interinstututional net, in wish different organism are involved; country statistical offices, national institutions in charge of the production of country MDG reports, national sectoral ministries and specialized regional and international agencies. These key actors are regionally coordinated by ECLAC. They meet to discuss the progress of the regional work and to define future actions whish are reported for its approval to the Sca.

Background of ECLAC MDG Statistical Programme