With its stated mission to reduce poverty and improve governance in developing countries by promoting the integration of reliable statistics and data into the decision-making process, international consortium PARIS21 brings together stakeholders from developing countries, donor countries, including Canada, and multilateral and international organizations to address the challenges of producing and providing reliable, high-quality official statistics in a rapidly changing world.
A 3-year Government of Canada-funded project was approved on March 21, 2016, with funding of CAD $750,000 and an end date of March 31, 2019. Statistics Canada worked with PARIS21 to leverage knowledge and technical assistance skills and enable wider dissemination of expertise internationally, including in Canada's countries of focus, by contributing to:
- building statistical capacity in developing countries by improving the knowledge and skills required in developing countries' statistical systems;
- improving the quality of statistics in developing countries;
- increasing accountability in developing countries by having better statistical information that will provide better statistical information for policy makers including helping developing countries provide disaggregated data and information for priority groups such as gender disaggregation, disability etc.; and
- strengthening governance by improving the underlying statistical system.