Beirut-Cairo, 4 December 2017 (Communication and Information Unit) – ESCWA has recently organized a workshop on “Fostering Innovation in the Public Sectors of Arab Countries” in Cairo under the patronage of Hala Helmy El Said, Egypt’s Minister of Planning, Monitoring and Administrative Reform.
 

The Workshop will focus on, inter alia, building national capacities for the implementation of the Framework for Development of Environment Statistics FDES 2013 which was endorsed by the United Nations Statistical Commission at its forty-fourth session in 2013 as the framework for strengthening environment statistics programmes in countries.
 
The Workshop will also provide training on selected topics of environment statistics, in particular on waste and water statistics, as well on environmentally-related SDG indicators and climate change statistics.

As the world is still struggling to fight the COVID-19 pandemic and its disruptive impact on agricultural value chain, the private sector and farmers in the Arab region are facing burdens on how to continue delivering along the agricultural value chain and ensure the continuity of supplies to consumers, for sustaining their livelihoods, from farm to fork. The United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA) leads on this Zoominar session to highlight the role of the private sector in the use of innovation and technology and the potential role of the public-private partnership and regional cooperation in reaching out to smallholders and building their resilience to crises, disasters and COVID-19 pandemic. The session is being held within the context of the International Forum on “International Forum on Innovation in Agri-Food Systems to achieve SDGs”, that was planned to take place in Saudi Arabia in March 2020 in preparations for the G20 meeting in KSA.

In many countries worldwide, the economy is experiencing rapid developments in a shift from production-based economy to information and knowledge based economy. In the Arab region, the ICT sector has grown rapidly over the past few years. e-services improved, and the use of this technology increased in economic and social sectors. The remarkable prosperity of the sector was accompanied by an overall economic growth in Arab countries at a better pace than previous years.