MEDSTAT IV

The previous phases of the MEDSTAT programme (MEDSTAT I and II) covered 10 Mediterranean countries: Algeria, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Palestine, Syria, Tunisia and Turkey. The MEDSTAT III programme covered nine countries, since Turkey had become an EU candidate country. The current and fourth phase of the cooperation in statistics, MEDSTAT IV, was launched in January 2016, covering ten ENP-South partner countries: Algeria, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Libya, Lebanon, Morocco, Palestine, Syria and Tunisia (cooperation with Syria is suspended).

The overall objective of the MEDSTAT IV project (2016-2019) is to promote evidence-based decision-making and to foster democratic development by improving the availability, visibility and accessibility of robust, reliable and timely statistical data in the European Neighbourhood South countries. The project provides expertise and technical support to:

• promote the harmonization of statistics in line with EU and international standards in 6 domains (business register and business statistics, trade statistics and balance of payments, energy statistics, labour market statistics, migration statistics and transport statistics)

• help implement the Statistical Code of Practice for the ENP-South countries (based on the European statistics Code of Practice) and improve quality of statistics,

• provide training on statistical methods and tools and

• ensure availability and visibility to a wide range of data.

The working groups covering the thematic domains and the horizontal issues mentioned above are set-up and led by one or more partner countries to ensure ownership.

More than hundred activities are planned to be implemented during the coming 40 months. MEDSTAT IV is providing technical and financial support to organise a wide set of events such as working group meetings, workshops, training sessions, study visits and technical assistance missions carried out by experts.

Addressing user needs in the preparation of the work programmes and consulting them on their needs for data analysis and dissemination, both at national and regional levels, will contribute to make the offer of statistics more relevant to the demand and to raise the visibility of statistics. The project will seek a stronger involvement of the users in defining the needs for statistics and promote and support joint activities and projects with users to obtain their feedback on the quality of relevance of the produced statistics. MEDSTAT IV will also establish synergies among activities in each sector, between the thematic working groups, between the thematic working group and the horizontal issues, and between the project activities and those organised by other international organisations operating in the region. The project will make use of both North-South and South – South cooperation.

More information on the European Commission website