FAO joins the Community
The Statistical Information System Collaboration Community (SIS-CC) welcomes the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations as its 16th member.
“FAO is very pleased to join the SIS-CC as this allows to implement collaborative solutions to the current efforts of the Organization in modernizing its statistical system. The modernization project aims to develop a corporate statistical dissemination platform and standard operating procedures to integrate and implement international standards to the current collection of FAO statistics databases, enabling the harmonization of statistical outputs across FAO. The integrated dissemination system, on one side, will reinforce the internal statistics governance and related data quality assurance processes while, on the other, will significantly increase efficiency by reducing development and maintenance costs of multiple IT platforms and technologies. Moreover, the project adopts a user-centric approach for data dissemination to improve user satisfaction and increase their analytical capacity with the integration of visual analytics software tools” said FAO Chief Statistician, Pietro Gennari.
Joining a community of international and national statistical organisations facing similar concerns is the driving force behind FAO’s membership. The OECD–led community offers a collaborative approach to co-investment towards the innovation of open source solutions – the .Stat Suite in particular – to support the production and dissemination of official statistics. It brings together statistical organisations to find efficient solutions to common problems.
“We are proud to welcome the FAO to the SIS-CC community. This very important milestone takes place in the context of a longstanding and active cooperation between FAO and OECD, spanning both statistics and policy. It is testimony to the relevance of our strategy and the quality of the .Stat Suite platform. It also offers new opportunities for cooperation on data and interoperability with the development community” said OECD Chief Statistician, Paul Schreyer.
The collaboration between FAO and SIS-CC arose from FAO’s Strategy for the Modernisation of Statistics, whose primary objective is to develop an integrated dissemination platform. The .Stat Suite was selected as the best solution for FAO to centralise its data on a unified platform underpinned by the SDMX standard. The .Stat Suite will help FAO implement its vision to improve the consistency and quality of FAO data and to develop new channels and services for data dissemination and exchange between FAO and national and international organisations.
Statistical work has been at the core of FAO’s activities and mandate since the Organization was founded in 1945. It is recognised as an authoritative source for data and statistics on a wide range of topics, including food security and nutrition, sustainable agriculture, rural development, natural resources management, forestry, fisheries and aquaculture. It is home to 22 major databases and hosts FAOSTAT, a freely accessible data platform, which contains the largest statistical database on food and agriculture in the world, with approximately 20,000 indicators covering more than 245 countries and territories, on topics such as agriculture, forestry, fisheries, and land and water resources. FAOSTAT is used by over 2M users per year worldwide.
About FAO
The Food and Agriculture Organization is a specialised agency of the United Nations that leads international efforts to defeat hunger. With 195 members, FAO works in over 130 countries worldwide. FAO’s goal is to achieve food security for all and make sure that people have regular access to enough high-quality food to lead active, healthy lives. FAO is committed to ensuring free access to current, reliable, timely and trusted data, with the ultimate goal to achieve a more sustainable agriculture and a world free from hunger.