ESCWA holds the tenth session of its Statistical Committee at the Headquarters of the League of Arab States in Cairo on 30 and 31 January 2013. This Session follows the thirty-seventh session of the Permanent Technical Committee on Statistics of the League of Arab States. Rule 18 of the ESCWA Rules of Procedure states that member countries shall assume the chairmanship of the sessions of the subsidiary bodies of the Commission on a rotating basis, in the Arabic alphabetical order employed by the United Nations. Unless the Commission decides otherwise, those bodies shall elect all their other officers. Pursuant to that rule, Oman shall assume the chairmanship of the tenth session of the Statistical Committee, succeeding Iraq, which assumed the chairmanship of the ninth session, from November 2010 to October 2012. The Session, which opens at 10:00 AM on Wednesday 30 January 2013, shall thus include statements by Head of the Iraqi Central Organization for Statistics and Information Technology (COSIT) at the Ministry of Planning and Development Cooperation Mahdi Allak, ESCWA Secretary of the Commission ad interim, Karim Khalil, on behalf of Executive Secretary Rima Khalaf, Director of the Department of Statistics and Databases at the League of Arab States (LAS) Huda Abul Leil, and Director General of Social Statistics at the Ministry of National Economy at the Sultanate of Oman Khalifa Bin Abdallah Al Barwani. At its tenth session, the Statistical Committee aims to consolidate cooperation between member countries and with other regional and international organizations active in statistics. It will consider strategic and forward-looking issues related to official statistics in the region, including: implications of regional and global events for the statistical work in the region; capacity-building in statistics for evidence-based policymaking; and effective use of statistics in policymaking. The Committee will also review the projects and activities currently undertaken by the Statistics Division at ESCWA, as well as the future projects and initiatives in the field of statistics. It is invited to make comments on the progress achieved and current activities, and make recommendations on the future work in the field of statistics, with a view to strengthening the statistical capacity of member countries. The ESCWA Statistical Committee is one of the Commission's specialized subsidiary intergovernmental committees, which play an important role as a major means of communication between member countries and the ESCWA secretariat on important matters. The Statistical Committee was established pursuant to an ESCWA resolution issued on 2 February 1993. It holds its sessions on a biennial basis. The objectives of establishing the Committee included: following up progress achieved by member countries in the development of their statistical systems; providing technical advice, proposing training programmes and organizing workshops and seminars to enhance their statistical capacity; assisting member countries in standardizing national statistics to make them more comparable at the regional and international levels; coordinating the exchange of statistical data and information between member countries and the United Nations Statistical Commission; and coordinating the statistical programmes of member countries The Committee will gather heads of national statistical offices in the ESCWA region, and concerned parties and experts from local and international organizations
