Rationale

The need to eradicate poverty has been the overarching concern of almost all countries around the world. It has also become a pivotal concern among international organizations engaged in capacity building through programming, implementation, monitoring, and/or funding of development initiatives such as the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and UN Economic and Social Council for Asia and the Pacific (UNESCAP), the Asian Development Bank, the World Bank, ASEAN, among others.

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) manifest to the call to generate a critical mass of support to address many societal concerns foremost of which is the reduction of poverty by half by the year 2015. The attainment of this goal has been become a virtual convergence point of all efforts related to poverty alleviation, assessment and impact monitoring across the globe.

Addressing the problem of poverty efficiently necessitates the availability and use of timely, accurate, and relevant official poverty statistics that are comparable within a locale or country and across countries for the formulation and implementation of interventions and in monitoring the impact on the target beneficiaries.

While national statistical agencies (NSAs) have remained steadfast in their efforts to address the statistical information gaps and methodological issues within the purview of their current official methodologies, it is unclear whether current practices will lead to the generation of official poverty statistics that is comparable within a country and among countries. There is a need therefore to evaluate in an appropriate forum the preparedness of the NSAs and to agree on the institutionalization of the regular compilation of official poverty statistics that will be used to assess the progress of attainment of the MDG on eradicating extreme poverty and hunger.

It is in this context that the Philippine Statistical System (PSS) spearheaded by the National Statistical Coordination Board (NSCB), and in cooperation with the UNESCAP and UNSD and various stakeholders of poverty statistics, is organizing the 2004 International Conference on Official Poverty Statistics: Methodology and Comparability.

Following the Conference is the conduct of the 3rd Regional Workshop on The Handbook on Poverty Statistics by the United Nations Statistics Division (UNSD).

The Conference will be conducted simultaneously with another international forum, the 2nd Meeting of the ASEAN Task Force on Statistical Classificaiton and the 9th National Convention on Statistics (NCS), a triennial event conducted by the Philippine Statistical System (PSS) to:

(a) provide a forum for exchanging ideas and experiences in the field of statistics and for discussing recent statistical developments and prevailing issues and problems of the PSS; and

(b) to elicit the cooperation and support of statisticians and professionals in related fields from the government, academe and private sector towards a more responsive statistical system.

The twin events will be the highlights of the nationwide observance of the 15th National Statistics Month (NSM) in October 2004.